*** Suffering Reps (NDI 2014) ***

Neg 1NC the GeneralRepresentations of suffering otherizes the sufferers and steals theirsubjectivity; the law silences their voice and destroys their agency.Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University ofWollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture, University of Wollongong, Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian law in black and white, ResearchOnline, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123-146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)

Representational practices define and constitute the representative as well as the represented, in adialectical process. Representation is a rich term with a long history that leaves traces in variousrelated meanings (Pitkin, 1972). There are three main senses of the term to be explored here,which may be called political, legal and aesthetic forms of representation. When rulers areresponsible to the ruled, they may be said to represent them, in a political sense. In the context oflegal practice, we refer to lawyers representing their clients. And in the visual arts we say that apainting or photograph represents its subject. This aesthetic sense can also refer to mediarepresentations of people and events.Hannah Arendt (1973: 75) pointed out that the new politics of the Jacobins after the Frenchrevolution derived legitimacy from their capacity to suffer with the immense class of the poor,accompanied by the will to raise compassion to the rank of the supreme political passion and thehighest political virtue. This new source of legitimacy replaced other forms of representation,displacing the republic and forms of government (under the Girondins) by the Jacobinsinvocation of le peuple, les malheureux, in Robespierres coupling of the concepts. Thecontinuing appeal of the Jacobin formula in French political rhetoric was seen in the 2007Presidential election, when both Nicholas Sarkozy and Segolene Royal dedicated their campaignsto la France qui souffre (Renault, 2008: 151).In political and legal discourse suffering is reconstructed from an experience of pain ordeprivation into a relationship, and this is notably a relationship between those who suffer andthose who do not. Renault (2008: 376) reports on Veena Dass analysis of reactions to the Bhopaldisaster in India, which found that legitimating tropes of legal discourse detached sufferingfrom the victims. The discourse of suffering was used to reduce those who suffered to silence,while the negotiations and construction of events, including that of the suffering itself, werecommandeered by politicians and lawyers. The emphasis here is on the victims of suffering,while the legal mechanisms are shown to have deprived them of a voice.Images of suffering typically portray the sufferer as the other, as distanced from us theresponsible, the actively viewing subject. In a series of photographs by Pierre Gonnordreproduced in El Pais under the heading El silencio de los marginados (Garcia , 2008), the mute,closed faces of the marginalised are in contrast to the outgoing, engaging presence of thephotographer himself, depicted by a newspaper photographer.The representation of suffering forms an essential component in that political economy ofsuffering that involves domination, desaffiliation and dispossession. On one hand, suffering isconstituted as a salient political phenomenon by artistic, media and political representations. Onthe other hand, responses to suffering are framed by representations of the suffering subject andits converse, the responsible subject. Where suffering is represented as silence, the role ofthose responsible becomes to represent, to speak for, and, finally, to act for the sufferers.The media, politicians and lawyers play these roles with professional zeal. In the meantime,responsibility for ones own actions and legal liability for specific injustices and the spoils ofdispossession are washed away by the tide of a reimagined history, dispersal of collectiveresponsibilities and the re- presentation of suffering embodied in those who suffer.The affs depictions of suffering can never be objective nor benign; the lawcommodifies the subjects of suffering to create a permanent state ofexception, where the law is suspended and militarism becomes normalized.Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University ofWollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture, University of Wollongong, Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian law in black and white, ResearchOnline, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123-146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)

Suffering, no matter how objective its conditions, cannot be understood in isolation from itsbroader social and cultural milieu. It has been noted, above, that the social aspects of sufferingindicate that people do not suffer simply as a result of some natural condition. Their suffering hassocial origins and causes, and its very construction as suffering has important consequences forthe way it is experienced and the frame within which solutions may be sought. The concludingsections of this article explore ways in which the theoretical analysis with which it began may beapplied to understanding, reimagining and responding to the suffering of Indigenous Australians.I turn first to questions of representations of suffering to see how these constitute subjects whosuffer, before dealing with questions of responsibility.In earlier discussion it was noted that representation in all three of its forms aesthetic, politicaland legal may actually compound suffering and render the sufferers more powerless. Mutesuffering is a powerful photographic trope, identified in the work of Pierre Gonnord (Garcia,2008) and also familiar from television reports of famines and disasters, and advertisements foraid agencies. The trope is active in depictions ofAboriginal Australians. An archival photograph on the cover of a leading Australian newspapersweekend magazine section (Good Weekend, 2009) on the anniversary of the Prime Ministersapology showed a tribal Aboriginal couple in a classic pose of powerlessness and mute suffering.The headline read Lest we forget, using the motto familiar from invocations to remember thewar dead, thus referring back to the genocidal imaginary of an earlier age, in which the demise ofthe Aboriginal race was assumed, and the role of the white man was to ease the dying pillow(Dodson et al., 2006). While ostensibly reminding us of injustice or of its redress through theApology, the subjects of suffering are silenced, symbolically killed by the unmistakablereference to remembrance and fallen soldiers. These constructions of suffering represent thesuffering subject in two senses: as an aesthetic and moral image, and as a silent subject who is inneed of representation: by a photographer, a politician, or a lawyer.Representation in these multiple senses came together with devastating impact in Aboriginalcommunities of the Northern Territory in 2007 following the release of the Little Children areSacred report on child abuse. The emergency response, described above, was justified by thehorrifying images of widespread Aboriginal child abuse that were talked up by the government.The image of suffering was used to justify the suspension of law . Renault (2008: 31) reportsNancy Scheper-Hughess analysis of the same tactic in Brazil.She has particularly described the way in which the violence and dehumanisation in the favelasconstitute not only factors aggravating social suffering inside these social exclusion zones, butalso arguments to justify armed violence exercised against their inhabitants by the rest of society(unlimited police repression, death squads, etc).The constitution of suffering as a social pathology going beyond the experience orcomprehension of those who do not suffer constructs the sufferers in a zone of biopolitics wherepolice repression, military intervention and extra-judicial killings are justified as theexception to the law. The Australian government was quite explicit in making this link: thesuffering constituted grounds for an emergency response that justified the suspension of law. Inthe first instance the terminology of a state of emergency (Agamben, 2005) was used to suspendthe operation of the Racial Discrimination Act. After its promise at the 2007 election to apply theAct to the intervention, it took the new Labor government two years to transmute emergencypowers into special measures, and other devices described above, to maintain the operation ofthe intervention while shielding them from legal appeals on the grounds of racism. With thepretext of protecting suffering children and women, successive governments have deprivedwhole communities of their rights to property and to legal protection from racialdiscrimination. The representation of suffering Aboriginal people has been used toconstitute them as a biopolitical substratum, unworthy of the legal protections affordedcitizens as fully-fledged political subjects.We must refuse the commodification of injury and suffering, and along withit, the politics of liberalism. Nothing short of total abstinence of liberal ethics,politics, and episteme can actualize change. Instead of ignoring violence orsuffering, we simply reject the representations that juxtaposition life againstsuffering; instead of wishing away violence or suffering, our alternativeallows for new forms of experience and sensuous life.Abbas 10 (Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science, Philosophyat the Liebowitz Center for International Studies, Liberalism and Human Suffering: MaterialistReflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, Palgrave Macmillion, RJ)

In Martha Nussbaums celebration of cosmopolitanism, the familiar move of the invocation of the worst sufferings ofmankind is bound to shut up and line everyone else in submission, not to the pain of others (as itmay appear), but more fundamentally to iterations of who I am as one who suffers, as one whoresponds to suffering, and as one troubled by each of those questions rather than having settledthem.47 Nussbaum or Shklar, in their philosophical commitments to differ- ent metaphysics (even inexplicit noncommitments to metaphysics), do not even consider that their invocation of events ofunimaginable suffering as cautionary tales for all of humanity is beholden to the sub- lime inways complicit with liberalisms political economy of suffering. In being so, they inadvertentlyevacuate the political in favor of some formalistic ethical certitude that may carry its own violentoblitera- tions, dysfunctionalizing political judgment in submission to ethical judgments alreadymade for us. The ethicization of discourse on suf- fering, and the submission to the violenceof violence, is a parallel to the death of the political. Similarly, as long as the aesthetic followsthis logicthat representation is unethical and violent in nature and that we must somehow leave it behindit will be limitedin its vision, unable to see the deep and necessary ontological connection between suffering andrepresentation. Beyond considering aesthetics at play in the artistry of rights and interests that privileges the Western scopic andrhetoricist regimes, the aesthetic must be seen as more closely derived from aisthesis (perception from the senses). The resultingessential, ontic, and experiential proximity to suffering may allow us to radically reimagine oursubjection to injuries, interests, and rights.The elements of a historical materialism of suffering introduced over the course of this chapternecessity, hope, and a materialist sensuous ethosreconsider woundedness and victimhood inorder to illuminate the multiplicity of relations that are, and can be, had to our own and otherssuffering. They expose the presumptions and certainties regarding the imperatives sufferingposes for sufferers that codify a basic distance from suffering and an inability to insinuatethe question of suffering in our comportments, orientations, and internal relations ofsimultaneity to the world.A righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings, enacted wounds, and relations to our own andothers suffering is not my objective here. One only has to consider, to build to a different end,how the judgments, actions, and reactions of many among us cannot help but reject consolationsthat come from codified knowledges and certi- tudes, such as those pertaining to what sufferingis, how we must despise it, and how we must fix it. Then, one only has to question the imperatives theseknowledges and certitudes pose for all of us, and examine the utilitarian charm of the beguiling tragedy of powerless institutions andother conscriptions of sympathy, empathy, voice, and desire for a markedly different world. This may involve not givinglib- eral institutions or fervent recruiters of various marginalities the power to set the terms ofhonoring the suffering and hope of others, and not giving them the power to corner our pathos, ina moment of ethical noblesse, by emphasizing how anothers suffering is impenetrable andunknowable. As much as this ethical noblesse upholds the letting be of the other, it is a preservation, first and foremost, ofoneselfper- versely reminiscent of the confusing touch-me-not of the Christ back from the dead, a Christ whose triumph over deathironically inspires entire cultures built on surplus fear, suffering, and death as offerings for those with terminal senses but endless lives It is imperative to reject both the righteous or tolerant(often the courtesy of the same historical cryogenics).pluralism of sufferings and the touch-me-not version of seemingly other-centered politics infavor of seeing our sufferings and our labors as coconstitutive of the world we inhabit.What would it mean, as Louis puts it to the Rabbi, to incorpo- rate sickness into ones sense of how things are supposed to go, toconvoke a politics that is good with death but asks for more life? Perhaps the sufferer not be incidental to thesuffering when suffering is defined as a problem only in the terms we can pretend to solve, onlyto fail at that, too. Perhaps liberal politics should accept that sta- tistics of diseases,mortalities, and morbidities, calculated in terms of the loss in human productivity, on theone hand, and those of prison populations and philanthropic gifts, on the other, are notgraceful confessions of its mastery of suffering or death . It is not that there are no sufferings tobe named, interpreted, and tended to. However, it is important to remember that this is not arandom, altruistic, or unme- diated process, and it benefits those with the agency and position toact on anothers suffering. Perhaps politics should be able to speak to, and for, the reserve army of those with abject, yet-to-be-inter- preted-and-recompensed sufferings, and those who have no ability to be injured outside of the terms native to liberalcapitalist discourse. Perhaps politics can diverge from its reliance on certain frames of suf- fering inorder to address the ubiquity and ordinariness of human tragedy and suffering. Perhaps, still, ifpolitics is concerned with the creation and maintenance of forms of life, then the activities of this making,when they negotiate with the past, present, and future, necessitate a look at the way old and new wounds areenacted in order to yield forms that are different.Ultimately, perhaps liberalisms colonization of suffering, and its moral dominion over it, needs to be

resisted and loosened. Questioning the forms in which we suffer and are told to do so is notthe same as altogether questioning the reality or centrality of suffering and ourresponsibility to it. The ways in which we suffer tell us what we need and do not need, what our bodies can and cannot bear.Politics must be pushed to engineer the passing of certain forms of suffering, not the passing ofsuffering altogether.The claim to having nailed the problem of suffering becomes sus- pect when politics learns fromsuffering not via the question of justice but, more immediately, as it responds to the suffering thatis life; when it is urgent to understand those ways of suffering that do not follow liberal logics; when attending to bodies who suffer,remember, and act out of their wounds differently is extremely necessary; when the question of the suffering of action is inseparablefrom the actions of the suffering; when our experience of the world and its ethical, politi- cal, and aesthetic moments is not prior to oroutside of justice, but constitutive of it; and when the need to understand necessity, the lack of choice, and the ordinariness of tragedyis part of the same story as the clumsiness of our responses to grand disaster.This is an offering toward a politics that is not modeled on the liberal, capitalist, and colonizingideals of healthy agents who are asked to live diametrically across from the pole of victimhood.Such an approach would factor in the material experiences of destruction, tragedy, violence,defeat, wounds, memory, hope, and survival that risk obliteration even by many well-meaningvictim-centered politics. The imagining of such a politics is not merely premised on suf- fering as something to be undone.Rather, it holds on to the ability to suffer as something to be striven for, grasped anew, and salvagedfrom the arbitrary dissipations imposed on it by global powers who not only refuse to takeresponsibility for the plight that they have every role in creating and locating but also shamelesslyarbitrate how the wounded can make their suffering matter.Modern schemes for solving the problem of human suffering succumb to their own hubris, evenas they set the terms of joy and sorrow, love and death, life and hope, salvation and freedom, thatthose subject to these schemes ought to have a role in determining. Maybe these schemes have no relevanceto those who suffer abjectly, or maybe the latter have lost their senses living among the dead who tyrannize us and the dead who It is time that we confront the nau- seating exploitations and self-affirmingbeseech us.decrepitude of Western liberal capitalist arbitrations of where suffering must live andwhere it must diethese moralities keep themselves alive and ascendant by alwaysinvoking their choice exceptions, fixating on those marginal relations to suffering and lifesignified in the savage acts of, say blowing up ones own and others bodies, often regardedas savage for no other reason than their violation of some silly rational choice maxim . Thereare many other exceptions that confront these dominations, not the least of which are the forms ofacculturations, past and present, that see the realm of ethics as deeper and richer than the space ofindividual moralities acted out. Similarly, some of these exceptions to learn from hold and honor suffering as an inherentlysocial act, as a welcome burden to carry with and for each other. If it is indeed the case that the world is so becausethe colonized have not stopped regurgitating, then the incipient fascisms in the metropoles todayought to make us wonder whether our problem as people of this world is not that there is notenough liberalism, but that, at best, liberalism is insufficient, and, at worst, it is complicit .Perhaps the majority of the world needs a politics that is material enough to speak to, and with,their silences, their pain, their losses, their defeats, their victories, their dispensabili- ties, theirmutilations, their self-injuries, their fidelities, their betrayals, their memories, their justice, theirhumor, and their hope. At stake in such an imagining is nothing less than the possibility ofnewer forms of joy, desire, hope, and life itself. 1NC Colonel MaoistThe 1ACs call to action is nothing more than a valorization of poverty andlack the affirmative operates under the position of the Maoist theirendless criticisms do nothing but prop up the very system that producesalterity in the first place, turning the case.Chow 93 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown, 1993, WritingDiaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies)

The Orientalist has a special sibling whom I will, in order to highlight her significance as a kindof representational agency, call the Maoist. Arif Dirlik, who has written extensively on the history of politicalmovements in twentieth-century China, sums up the interpretation of Mao Zedong commonly found in Western Marxist analyses interms of a "Third Worldist fantasy""a fantasy of Mao as a Chinese reincarnation of Marx who fulfilled theMarxist promise that had been betrayed in the West."'6 The Maoist was the phoenix which arosefrom the ashes of the great disillusionment with Western culture in the 1960s and which foundhope in the Chinese Communist Revolution.17 In the 1970s, when it became possible for Westernersto visit China as guided and pampered guests of the Beijing establishment, Maoists came backwith reports of Chinese society's absolute, positive difference from Western society and of theCultural Revolution as "the most important and innovative example of Mao's concern with thepursuit of egalitarian, populist, and communitarian ideals in the course of economicmodernization" (Harding, p. 939). At that time, even poverty in China was regarded as "spirituallyennobling, since it meant that [the] Chinese were not possessed by the wasteful andacquisitive consumerism of the United States " (Harding, p. 941). Although the excessive admirationof the 1970s has since been replaced by an oftentimes equally excessive denigration of China, theMaoist is very much alive among us, and her significance goes far beyond the China and EastAsian fields. Typically, the Maoist is a cultural critic who lives in a capitalist society but who isfed up with capitalism a cultural critic, in other words, who wants a social order opposed to theone that is supporting her own undertaking. The Maoist is thus a supreme example of the waydesire works: What she wants is always located in the other, resulting in an iden-tification withand valorization of that which she is not/does not have. Since what is valorized is often the other'sdeprivation "having" poverty or "having" nothing the Maoist's strategy becomes in themain a rhetorical renunciation of the material power that enables her rhetoric.The discursive representation of the victimized subaltern robs the oppressedof their vocabulary and denies their political agency; the affirmative drawson suffering as a way to further their own political agenda and legitimizetheir priveleged positions.Chow 93 (Rey, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at Brown, 1993, WritingDiaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies)

In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the Maoist is disillusioned to watch the China they sanctified crumble before their eyes. This is theperiod in which we hear disapproving criticisms of contemporary Chinese people for liking Western pop music and consumer culture,or for being overly interested in sex. In a way that makes her indistinguishable from what at first seems a political enemy, theOrientalist, the Maoist now mourns the loss of her loved objectSocialist Chinaby pointingangrily at living "third world" natives. For many who have built their careers on the vision of Socialist China, the grief istremendous. In the "cultural studies" of the American academy in the 1990s, the Maoist isreproducing with prowess. We see this in the way terms such as "oppression," "victimization,"and "subalternity" are now being used. Contrary to Orientalist disdain for contemporary native cultures of the non-West,the Maoist turns precisely the "disdained" other into the object of his/her study and, in somecases, identification. In a mixture of admiration and moralism, the Maoist sometimes turns allpeople from non-Western cultures into a generalized "subaltern" that is then used to flog anequally generalized West.**21 Because the representation of "the other" as such ignores (1) theclass and intellectual hierarchies within these other cultures, which are usually as elaborate asthose in the West, and (2) the discursive power relations structuring the Maoist's mode of inquiryand valorization, it produces a way of talking in which notions of lack, subalternity, victimization,and so forth are drawn upon indiscriminately, often with the intention of spotlighting thespeaker's own sense of alterity and political righteousness. A comfortably wealthy whiteAmerican intellectual I know claimed that he was a "third world intellectual," citing as one of hiscredentials his marriage to a West-ern European woman of part-Jewish heritage; a professor of English complainedabout being "victimized" by the structured time at an Ivy League institution, meaning that sheneeded to be on time for classes; a graduate student of upper-class background from one of the world's poorest countriestold his American friends that he was of poor peasant stock in order to authenticate his identity as a radical "third world"representative; male and female academics across the U.S. frequently say they were "raped" when they report experiences ofprofessional frustration and conflict. Whether sincere or delusional, such cases of self-dramatization all takethe route of self-subalternization, which has increasingly become the assured means to authorityand power. What these intellectuals are doing is robbing the terms of oppression of their criticaland oppositional import, and thus depriving the oppressed of even the vocabulary of protest andrightful demand. The oppressed, whose voices we seldom hear, are robbed twice the firsttime of their economic chances, the second time of their language, which is now no longerdistinguishable from those of us who have had our consciousnesses "raised." In their analysis of therelation between violence and representation, Armstrong and Tennenhouse write: "[ The] idea of violence asrepresentation is not an easy one for most academies to accept. It implies that whenever we speakfor someone else we are inscribing her with our own (implicitly masculine) idea of order."22 Atpresent, this process of "inscribing" often means not only that we "represent" certain historic othersbecause they are/were "oppressed"; it often means that there is interest in representation onlywhen what is represented can in some way he seen as lacking. Even though the Maoist is usually contemptuousof Freudian psychoanalysis because it is "bourgeois," her investment in oppression and victimization fully partakes of the Freudianand Lacanian notions of "lack." By attributing "lack," the Maoist justifies the "speaking for someone else"that Armstrong and Tennenhouse call "violence as representation." As in the case of Orientalism, which doesnot necessarily belong only to those who are white, the Maoist does not have to be racially "white" either.The phrase "white guilt" refers to a type of discourse which continues to position power and lackagainst each other, while the narrator of that discourse, like Jane Eyre, speaks with power butidentifies with powerlessness. This is how even those who come from privilege more often thannot speak from/of/as its "lack." What the Maoist demonstrates is a circuit of productivitythat draws its capital from others' deprivation while refusing to acknowledge its ownpresence as endowed . With the material origins of her own discourse always concealed, the Maoist thus speaks asif her charges were a form of immaculate conception. The difficulty facing us, it seems to me, is no longer simplythe "first world" Orientalist who mourns the rusting away of his treasures, but also students from privileged backgrounds Western andnon-Western, who conform behaviorally in every respect with the elitism of their social origins (e.g., through powerful matrimonialalliances, through pursuit of fame, or through a contemptuous arrogance toward fellow students) but who nonetheless proclaimdedication to "vindicating the subalterns." My point is not that they should be blamed for the accident of theirbirth, nor that they cannot marry rich, pursue fame, or even be arrogant. Rather, it is that theychoose to see in others' powerlessness an idealized image of themselves and refuse to hear in thedissonance between the content and manner of their speech their own complicity with violence.Even though these descendents of the Maoist may be quick to point out the exploitativeness of Benjamin Disraelis "The East is acareer,"23 they remain blind to their own exploitativeness as they make "the East" their career. How do we intervene in theproductivity of this overdetermined circuit?We must refuse the commodification of injury and suffering, and along withit, the politics of liberalism. Nothing short of total abstinence of liberal ethics,politics, and episteme can actualize change. Instead of ignoring violence orsuffering, we simply reject the representations that juxtaposition life againstsuffering; instead of wishing away violence or suffering, our alternativeallows for new forms of experience and sensuous life.Abbas 10 (Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science, Philosophyat the Liebowitz Center for International Studies, Liberalism and Human Suffering: MaterialistReflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, Palgrave Macmillion, RJ)

In Martha Nussbaums celebration of cosmopolitanism, the familiar move of the

invocation of the worst sufferings ofmankind is bound to shut up and line everyone else in submission, not to the pain of others (as itmay appear), but more fundamentally to iterations of who I am as one who suffers, as one whoresponds to suffering, and as one troubled by each of those questions rather than having settledthem.47 Nussbaum or Shklar, in their philosophical commitments to differ- ent metaphysics (even inexplicit noncommitments to metaphysics), do not even consider that their invocation of events ofunimaginable suffering as cautionary tales for all of humanity is beholden to the sub- lime inways complicit with liberalisms political economy of suffering. In being so, they inadvertentlyevacuate the political in favor of some formalistic ethical certitude that may carry its own violentoblitera- tions, dysfunctionalizing political judgment in submission to ethical judgments alreadymade for us. The ethicization of discourse on suf- fering, and the submission to the violenceof violence, is a parallel to the death of the political. Similarly, as long as the aesthetic followsthis logicthat representation is unethical and violent in nature and that we must somehow leave it behindit will be limitedin its vision, unable to see the deep and necessary ontological connection between suffering andrepresentation. Beyond considering aesthetics at play in the artistry of rights and interests that privileges the Western scopic andrhetoricist regimes, the aesthetic must be seen as more closely derived from aisthesis (perception from the senses). The resultingessential, ontic, and experiential proximity to suffering may allow us to radically reimagine oursubjection to injuries, interests, and rights.The elements of a historical materialism of suffering introduced over the course of this chapternecessity, hope, and a materialist sensuous ethosreconsider woundedness and victimhood inorder to illuminate the multiplicity of relations that are, and can be, had to our own and otherssuffering. They expose the presumptions and certainties regarding the imperatives sufferingposes for sufferers that codify a basic distance from suffering and an inability to insinuatethe question of suffering in our comportments, orientations, and internal relations ofsimultaneity to the world.A righteous or tolerant pluralism of sufferings, enacted wounds, and relations to our own andothers suffering is not my objective here. One only has to consider, to build to a different end,how the judgments, actions, and reactions of many among us cannot help but reject consolationsthat come from codified knowledges and certi- tudes, such as those pertaining to what sufferingis, how we must despise it, and how we must fix it. Then, one only has to question the imperatives theseknowledges and certitudes pose for all of us, and examine the utilitarian charm of the beguiling tragedy of powerless institutions andother conscriptions of sympathy, empathy, voice, and desire for a markedly different world. This may involve not givinglib- eral institutions or fervent recruiters of various marginalities the power to set the terms ofhonoring the suffering and hope of others, and not giving them the power to corner our pathos, ina moment of ethical noblesse, by emphasizing how anothers suffering is impenetrable andunknowable. As much as this ethical noblesse upholds the letting be of the other, it is a preservation, first and foremost, ofoneselfper- versely reminiscent of the confusing touch-me-not of the Christ back from the dead, a Christ whose triumph over deathironically inspires entire cultures built on surplus fear, suffering, and death as offerings for those with terminal senses but endless lives It is imperative to reject both the righteous or tolerant(often the courtesy of the same historical cryogenics).pluralism of sufferings and the touch-me-not version of seemingly other-centered politics infavor of seeing our sufferings and our labors as coconstitutive of the world we inhabit.What would it mean, as Louis puts it to the Rabbi, to incorpo- rate sickness into ones sense of how things are supposed to go, toconvoke a politics that is good with death but asks for more life? Perhaps the sufferer not be incidental to thesuffering when suffering is defined as a problem only in the terms we can pretend to solve, onlyto fail at that, too. Perhaps liberal politics should accept that sta- tistics of diseases,mortalities, and morbidities, calculated in terms of the loss in human productivity, on theone hand, and those of prison populations and philanthropic gifts, on the other, are notgraceful confessions of its mastery of suffering or death . It is not that there are no sufferings tobe named, interpreted, and tended to. However, it is important to remember that this is not arandom, altruistic, or unme- diated process, and it benefits those with the agency and position toact on anothers suffering. Perhaps politics should be able to speak to, and for, the reserve army of those with abject, yet-to-be-inter- preted-and-recompensed sufferings, and those who have no ability to be injured outside of the terms native to liberalcapitalist discourse. Perhaps politics can diverge from its reliance on certain frames of suf- fering inorder to address the ubiquity and ordinariness of human tragedy and suffering. Perhaps, still, ifpolitics is concerned with the creation and maintenance of forms of life, then the activities of this making,when they negotiate with the past, present, and future, necessitate a look at the way old and new wounds areenacted in order to yield forms that are different.Ultimately, perhaps liberalisms colonization of suffering, and its moral dominion over it, needs to be

resisted and loosened. Questioning the forms in which we suffer and are told to do so is notthe same as altogether questioning the reality or centrality of suffering and ourresponsibility to it. The ways in which we suffer tell us what we need and do not need, what our bodies can and cannot bear.Politics must be pushed to engineer the passing of certain forms of suffering, not the passing ofsuffering altogether.The claim to having nailed the problem of suffering becomes sus- pect when politics learns fromsuffering not via the question of justice but, more immediately, as it responds to the suffering thatis life; when it is urgent to understand those ways of suffering that do not follow liberal logics; when attending to bodies who suffer,remember, and act out of their wounds differently is extremely necessary; when the question of the suffering of action is inseparablefrom the actions of the suffering; when our experience of the world and its ethical, politi- cal, and aesthetic moments is not prior to oroutside of justice, but constitutive of it; and when the need to understand necessity, the lack of choice, and the ordinariness of tragedyis part of the same story as the clumsiness of our responses to grand disaster.This is an offering toward a politics that is not modeled on the liberal, capitalist, and colonizingideals of healthy agents who are asked to live diametrically across from the pole of victimhood.Such an approach would factor in the material experiences of destruction, tragedy, violence,defeat, wounds, memory, hope, and survival that risk obliteration even by many well-meaningvictim-centered politics. The imagining of such a politics is not merely premised on suf- fering as something to be undone.Rather, it holds on to the ability to suffer as something to be striven for, grasped anew, and salvagedfrom the arbitrary dissipations imposed on it by global powers who not only refuse to takeresponsibility for the plight that they have every role in creating and locating but also shamelesslyarbitrate how the wounded can make their suffering matter.Modern schemes for solving the problem of human suffering succumb to their own hubris, evenas they set the terms of joy and sorrow, love and death, life and hope, salvation and freedom, thatthose subject to these schemes ought to have a role in determining. Maybe these schemes have no relevanceto those who suffer abjectly, or maybe the latter have lost their senses living among the dead who tyrannize us and the dead who It is time that we confront the nau- seating exploitations and self-affirmingbeseech us.decrepitude of Western liberal capitalist arbitrations of where suffering must live andwhere it must diethese moralities keep themselves alive and ascendant by alwaysinvoking their choice exceptions, fixating on those marginal relations to suffering and lifesignified in the savage acts of, say blowing up ones own and others bodies, often regardedas savage for no other reason than their violation of some silly rational choice maxim . Thereare many other exceptions that confront these dominations, not the least of which are the forms ofacculturations, past and present, that see the realm of ethics as deeper and richer than the space ofindividual moralities acted out. Similarly, some of these exceptions to learn from hold and honor suffering as an inherentlysocial act, as a welcome burden to carry with and for each other. If it is indeed the case that the world is so becausethe colonized have not stopped regurgitating, then the incipient fascisms in the metropoles todayought to make us wonder whether our problem as people of this world is not that there is notenough liberalism, but that, at best, liberalism is insufficient, and, at worst, it is complicit .Perhaps the majority of the world needs a politics that is material enough to speak to, and with,their silences, their pain, their losses, their defeats, their victories, their dispensabili- ties, theirmutilations, their self-injuries, their fidelities, their betrayals, their memories, their justice, theirhumor, and their hope. At stake in such an imagining is nothing less than the possibility ofnewer forms of joy, desire, hope, and life itself. 1NC MulticulturalismThe affirmatives focus on cultural tolerance ignores the exploitative socialstructures that creates difference in the first place; their absolute focus oninclusion necessarily excludes the Other from participating in politics.Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry Autumn 2007, Tolerance as an Ideological Category,http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)

Why are today so many problems perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems ofinequality, exploitation, injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation, political struggle, evenarmed struggle? The immediate answer is the liberal multiculturalist's basic ideological operation: the"culturalization of politics" - political differences, differences conditioned by political inequality,economic exploitation, etc., are naturalized/neutralized into "cultural" differences, different "waysof life," which are something given, something that cannot be overcome, but merely "tolerated."To this, of course, one should answer in Benjaminian terms: from culturalization of politics to politicization of culture. The causeof this culturalization is the retreat, failure, of direct political solutions (Welfare State, socialistprojects, etc.). Tolerance is their post-political ersatz:The retreat from more substantive visions of justice heralded by the promulgation of tolerancetoday is part of a more general depoliticization of citizenship and power and retreat from politicallife itself. The cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection ofpolitics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, adomain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation. [1]Perhaps, nothing expresses better the inconsistency of the post-political liberal project than itsimplicit paradoxical identification of culture and nature, the two traditional opposites: cultureitself is naturalized, posited as something given. (The idea of culture as "second nature" is, of course, an old one.) Itwas, of course, Samuel Huntington who proposed the most successful formula of this "culturalization of politics" by locating the mainsource of today's conflicts into the "clash of civilizations," what one is tempted to call the Huntington's disease of our time - as he put after the end of the Cold War, the "iron curtain of ideology" has been replaced by theit,"velvet curtain of culture . [2] Huntington's dark vision of the "clash of civilizations" may appear to be the very oppositeof Francis Fukuyama's bright prospect of the End of History in the guise of a world-wide liberal democracy: what can be moredifferent from Fukuyama's pseudo-Hegelian idea of the "end of history" (the final Formula of the best possible social order was foundin capitalist liberal democracy, there is now no space for further conceptual progress, there are just empirical obstacles to beovercome), [3] than Huntington's "clash of civilizations" as the main political struggle in the XXIst century? The "clash ofcivilizations" IS politics at the "end of history."The framework of cultural tolerance justifies militant aggression andintervention; every framework of acceptance necessitates a framework ofexclusion.Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry Autumn 2007, Tolerance as an Ideological Category,http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)

Contemporary liberalism forms a complex network of ideologies, institutional and non-institutional practices;however, underlying this multiplicity is a basic opposition on which the entire liberal vision relies ,the opposition between those who are ruled by culture, totally determined by the life-worldinto which they were born, and those who merely "enjoy" their culture, who are elevatedabove it, free to choose their culture . This brings us to the next paradox: the ultimate source of barbarismis culture itself, one's direct identification with a particular culture which renders one intoleranttowards other cultures. The basic opposition is thus related to the opposite between collective and individual: culture isby definition collective and particular, parochial, exclusive of other cultures, while - next paradox- it is the individual who is universal, the site of universality, insofar as s/he extricates itself fromand elevates itself above its particular culture. Since, however, every individual has to besomehow "particularized," it has to dwell in a particular life-world, the only way to resolve thisdeadlock is to split the individual into universal and particular, public and private (where "private"covers both the "safe haven" of family and the non-state public sphere of civil society (economy)). In liberalism, culturesurvives, but as privatized: as way of life, a set of beliefs and practices, not the publicnetwork of norms and rules . Culture is thus literally transubstantiated: the same sets of beliefs and practices change fromthe binding power of a collective into an expression of personal and private idiosyncrasies.Insofar as culture itself is the source of barbarism and intolerance, the inevitable conclusion isthat the only way to overcome intolerance and violence is to extricate the core of subject's being,its universal essence, from culture: in its core, the subject has to be kulturlos. (This, incidentally, gives a new twist toJoseph Goebbels's infamous formula "when I hear the word culture, I reach for my gun" - but not when I hear the word civilization.)Wendy Brown problematizes this liberal notion on a multitude of levels:First, it is not truly universal, kulturlos. Since, in our societies, a sexualized division of labor stillpredominates which confers a male twist on basic liberal categories (autonomy, public activity,competition), and relegates women to the private sphere of family solidarity, etc., liberalismitself, in its opposition of private and public, harbors male dominance. Furthermore, it is onlythe modern Western capitalist culture for which autonomy, individual freedom, etc., standhigher than collective solidarity, connection, responsibility for dependent others, the dutyto respect the customs of one's community - again, liberalism itself privileges a certainculture, the modern Western one.Brown's second line of attack concerns the freedom of choice - here, also, liberalism shows a strong bias. It showsintolerance when individuals of other cultures are not given freedom of choice (cliterodectomy, childbrideship, infanticide, polygamy, family rape...); however, it ignores the tremendous pressure which, forexample, compels women in our liberal society to undergo plastic surgery, cosmeticimplants, Botox injections, etc., in order to remain competitive on the sex market.Finally, there are all the self-referring paradoxes centered on the impasse of tolerating intolerance. Liberalistmulticulturalism preaches tolerance between cultures, while making it clear that true tolerance isfully possible only in the individualist Western culture, and thus legitimizes even militaryinterventions as an extreme mode of fighting the other's intolerance - some US feministssupported the US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq as a form of helping the women in thesecountries... However, Brown tries to get too much mileage from this self-referential paradox which a radical liberal would simplyassume without any inconsistency: if I believe in individual choice and tolerance of different cultures, OF COURSE this obliges me tobe "intolerant" towards cultures which prevent choice and tolerance. Brown makes it easy here with focusing ontoday's anti-Islamism - but what about, say, the struggle against Nazism? Is it not also a"paradox" that the allied block fought a brutal war against Fascism on behalf of tolerance andpeace? So what? There are limits to tolerance, and to be tolerant towards intolerance meanssimply to support ("tolerate") intolerance.Our alternative is to embrace the underground; institutions are propped upunder the framework of tolerance and interpassive action interrogating andcritiqueing the bankrupt practices of Western episteme allows for a newparadigm of politics that effectuates change.Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry Autumn 2007, Tolerance as an Ideological Category,http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)

Orwell's point is that radicals invoke the need for revolutionary change as a kind of superstitioustoken that should achieve the opposite, i.e., PREVENT the change from really occurring - atoday's academic Leftist who criticizes the capitalist cultural imperialism is in realityhorrified at the idea that his field of study would really break down . There is, however, a limit to thisstrategy: Orwell's insight holds only for a certain kind of "bourgeois" Leftists; there are Leftists who DO HAVE the courage of theirconvictions, who do not only want "revolution without revolution," as Robespierre put it - Jacobins and Bolsheviks, among others...The starting point of these true revolutionaries can be the very position of the "bourgeois"Leftists; what happens is that, in the middle of their pseudo-radical posturing, they get caught intotheir own game and are ready to put in question their subjective position. It is difficult to imagine a moretrenchant political example of the weight of Lacan's distinction between the "subject of the enunciated" and the "subject of theenunciation": first, in a direct negation, you start by wanting to "change the world" withoutendangering the subjective position from which you are ready to enforce the change; then, in the"negation of negation," the subject enacting the change is ready to pay the subjective price for it,to change himself, or, to quote Gandhi's nice formula, to BE himself the change he wants to see inthe world. - It is thus clear to Orwell that, in our ideological everyday, our predominant attitude is that of an ironic distancetowards our true beliefs:the left-wing opinions of the average 'intellectual' are mainly spurious. From pure imitativenesshe jeers at things which in fact he believes in. As one example out of many, take the public-school code of honor, with its 'team spirit' and 'Don't hit a man when he's down', and all the restof that familiar bunkum. Who has not laughed at it? Who, calling himself an 'intellectual', would dare not to laughat it? But it is a bit different when you meet somebody who laughs at it from the outside; just as we spend our lives in abusing Englandbut grow very angry when we hear a foreigner saying exactly the same things. /.../ It is only when you meet someone of a differentculture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.There is nothing "inner" in this true ideological identity of mine - my innermost beliefs are all"out there," embodied in practices which reach up to the immediate materiality of my body - "mynotions-notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful - are essentially middle-classnotions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honor, my table manners, my turns ofspeech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body"... One should definitely add tothis series smell: perhaps the key difference between lower popular class and middle classconcerns the way they relate to smell. For the middle class, lower classes smell, their members donot wash regularly - or, to quote the proverbial answer of a middle-class Parisian to why heprefers to ride the first class cars in the metro: "I wouldn't mind riding with workers in the secondclass - it is only that they smell!" This brings us to one of the possible definitions of what a Neighbor means today: aNeighbor is the one who by definition smells. This is why today deodorants and soaps are crucial - they make neighbors at leastminimally tolerable: I am ready to love my neighbors... provided they don't smell too bad. According to a recent report, scientists in alaboratory in Venezuela added a further element to these series: through genetic manipulations, they succeeded in growing beanswhich, upon consumption, do not generate the bad-smelling and socially embarrassing winds! So, after decaf coffee, fat-free cakes,diet cola and alcohol-free beer, we now get wind-free beans... [16] Lacan supplemented Freud's list of partial objects (breast, faeces,penis) with two further objects: voice and gaze. Perhaps, we should add another object to this series: smell.We reach thereby the "heart of darkness" of habits. Recall numerous cases of pedophilia that shatter the Catholic Church: when itsrepresentatives insists that these cases, deplorable as they are, are Church's internal problem, and display great reluctance tocollaborate with police in their investigation, they are, in a way, right - the pedophilia of Catholic priests is not something thatconcerns merely the persons who, because of accidental reasons of private history with no relation to the Church as an institution,happened to chose the profession of a priest; it is a phenomenon that concerns the Catholic Church as such, that is inscribed into its It does not concern the "private" unconscious ofvery functioning as a socio-symbolic institution.individuals, but the "unconscious" of the institution itself: it is not something that happensbecause the Institution has to accommodate itself to the pathological realities of libidinallife in order to survive, but something that the institution itself needs in order to reproduceitself. One can well imagine a "straight" (not pedophiliac) priest who, after years of service, gets involved in pedophilia because thevery logic of the institution seduces him into it. Such an institutional Unconscious designates the obscene disavowed underside that,precisely as disavowed, sustains the public institution. (In the army, this underside consists of the obscene sexualized rituals offragging etc. which sustain the group solidarity.) In other words, it is not simply that, for conformist reasons,the Church tries to hush up the embarrassing pedophilic scandals; in defending itself, the Churchdefends its innermost obscene secret. What this means is that identifying oneself with this secret side isa key constituent of the very identity of a Christian priest: if a priest seriously (not just rhetorically)denounces these scandals, he thereby excludes himself from the ecclesiastic community, he is nolonger "one of us" (in exactly the same way a citizen of a town in the South of the US in the 1920s, if he denounced Ku KluxKlan to the police, excluded himself from his community, i.e., betrayed its fundamental solidarity). Consequently, theanswer to the Church's reluctance should be not only that we are dealing with criminal cases andthat, if Church does not fully participate in their investigation, it is an accomplice after the fact;moreover, Church AS SUCH, as an institution, should be investigated with regard to theway it systematically creates conditions for such crimes.This obscene underground of habits is what is really difficult to change, which is why the mottoof every radical emancipatory politics is the same as the quote from Virgil that Freud chose as theexergue for his Interpretations of Dreams: Acheronta movebo - dare to move the underground! FrameworkRepresentations of suffering are neither objective nor benign; suffering iscommodified in order to justify a permanent suspension of the law wherebymilitant policing, violent acts of suppression, and rapeability are inscribedinto the lives of the colonized thats Mohr. The question you should askyourself in this debate is what does voting aff do for the oppressed theydescribe in the 1AC?Our kritik tests the intrinsicness between the ballot and their narratives ofsuffering hold the aff to a high threshold to prove that an affirmative ballotwill help _______.The rest of the debate is irrelevant we think the team that presents the bestrepresentational relationship to the ______ should win.That comes prior the belief that what we say directly changes the lives ofthe oppressed is nave its a question of how we interrogate our ownpriveleged positions in relation to the subaltern.Chow 93 (Rey, professor of English and comparative literature and director of the comparativeliterature program at the University of California, Writing Diaspora: tactics of intervention incontemporary cultural studies,)

We need to remember as intellectuals that the battles we fight are battles of words. Those whoargue the oppositional standpoint are not doing anything different from their enemies and aremost certainly not directly changing the downtrodden lives of those who seek their survival inmetropolitan and nonmetropolitan space alike. What academic intellectuals must confront is thusnot their victimization by society at large (or their victimization-in-solidarity-with-the-oppressed), but the power, wealth, and privilege that ironically accumulate from theiroppositional viewpoint, and the widening gap between the professed contents of their wordsand the upward mobility they gain from such words. (When Foucault said intellectuals need tostruggle against becoming the object and instrument of power, he spoke precisely to this kind ofsituation.) The predicament we face in the West, where intellectual freedom shares a history witheconomic enterprise, is that if a professor wishes to denounce aspects of big business,. . . he willbe wise to locate in a school whose trustees are big businessmen.28 Why should we believe inthose who continue to speak a language of alterity-as-lack while their salaries and honoraria keeprising? How do we resist the turning-into-propriety of oppositional discourses, when the intentionof such discourses has been that of displacing and disowning the proper? How do we preventwhat begin as tactics that which is without any base where it could stockpile its winnings (deCerteau, p.37)from turning into a solidly fenced-off field, in the military no less than in theacademic sense?The 1AC is the paradigm example of interpassive politics by claiming totake action on behalf of the oppressed, the affirmative merely operates withinhegemonic ideological coordinates the media and academia merelylegitimize themselves via the narratives of suffering.Zizek 97 (Slavoj Zizek, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana, RepeatingLenin, www.lacan.com/replenin)One is therefore tempted to turn around Marx's thesis 11: the first task today is precisely NOT tosuccumb to the temptation to act, to directly intervene and change things (which then inevitablyends in a cul de sac of debilitating impossibility: "what can one do against the global capital?"),but to question the hegemonic ideological coordinates. If, today, one follows a direct call to act,this act will not be performed in an empty space - it will be an act WITHIN the hegemonicideological coordinates: those who "really want to do something to help people" get involved in(undoubtedly honorable) exploits like Medecins sans frontiere, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns, which are all not only tolerated, but even supported by the media, even if theyseemingly enter the economic territory (say, denouncing and boycotting companies which do notrespect ecological conditions or which use child labor) - they are tolerated and supported aslong as they do not get too close to a certain limit. This kind of activity provides the perfectexample of interpassivity: of doing things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT fromsomething really happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct,etc., activity fits the formula of "Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally,things will remain the same! Let us take two predominant topics of today's American radicalacademia: postcolonial and queer (gay) studies. The problem of postcolonialism is undoubtedlycrucial; however, "postcolonial studies" tend to translate it into the multiculturalist problematic ofthe colonized minorities' "right to narrate" their victimizing experience, of the power mechanismswhich repress "otherness," so that, at the end of the day, we learn that the root of the postcolonialexploitation is our intolerance towards the Other, and, furthermore, that this intolerance itself isrooted in our intolerance towards the "Stranger in Ourselves," in our inability to confront what werepressed in and of ourselves - the politico-economic struggle is thus imperceptibly transformedinto a pseudo-psychoanalytic drama of the subject unable to confront its inner traumas... The truecorruption of the American academia is not primarily financial, it is not only that they are able tobuy many European critical intellectuals (myself included - up to a point), but conceptual: notionsof the "European" critical theory are imperceptibly translated into the benign universe of theCultural Studies chic. My personal experience is that practically all of the "radical" academicssilently count on the long-term stability of the American capitalist model, with the securetenured position as their ultimate professional goal (a surprising number of them even play onthe stock market). If there is a thing they are genuinely horrified of, it is a radical shattering of the(relatively) safe life environment of the "symbolic classes" in the developed Western societies.Their excessive Politically Correct zeal when dealing with sexism, racism, Third Worldsweatshops, etc., is thus ultimately a defense against their own innermost identification, akind of compulsive ritual whose hidden logic is: "Let's talk as much as possible about thenecessity of a radical change to make it sure that nothing will really change!" Symptomatic ishere the journal October: when you ask one of the editors to what the title refers, they will half-confidentially signal that it is, of course, THAT October - in this way, one can indulge in thejargonistic analyses of the modern art, with the hidden assurance that one is somehow retainingthe link with the radical revolutionary past... With regard to this radical chic, the first gesturetowards the Third Way ideologists and practitioners should be that of praise: they at least playtheir game in a straight way, and are honest in their acceptance of the global capitalistcoordinates, in contrast to the pseudo-radical academic Leftists who adopt towards the Third Waythe attitude of utter disdain, while their own radicality ultimately amounts to an empty gesturewhich obliges no one to anything determinate. Impact Bare LifeAnd, their depictions of suffering reduces human existence to bare life thatnecessitates the state of exception, when the sovereign suspends the law andconrols life and death via necropolitics.Duarte 5 (Andr, Biopolitics and the dissemination of violence: the Arendtian critique of thepresent, April 2005, http://www.hannaharendt.net/index.php/han/article/view/69/102 //RJ)

These historic transformations have not only wrought more violence at the core of the politicalbut have also redefined its character by giving rise to biopolitical violence. As we have stated,what characterizes biopolitics is the dynamic of both protecting and abandoning life through itsinclusion and exclusion from the political and economic community. Thus, in Arendtian terms, the aspectthat best describes biopolitical danger is the risk of converting the animal laborans into whatAgamben has described as the homo sacer, the human being that can be put to death byanyone and whose death does not imply any crime whatsoever .16 In other terms, when politics isconceived of as biopolitics, in the sense of increasing life and happiness of the national animallaborans, the Nation-state becomes more and more violent and murderous. If we link Arendt's thesis fromThe Human Condition to those defended in The Origins of Totalitarianism we understand that the Nazi and Stalinistextermination camps were the most refined laboratories designed for the annihilation of the 'barelife' of the animal laborans, although they were not the only instances devoted to humanslaughter. Hannah Arendt does not center her analysis only on the process of the extermination itself; she also discusses thehistorical process under which large-scale exterminations were rendered possible: the emergence of the animal laborans out ofuprootedness and superfluousness of modern masses. She gives us a hint of this understanding when she affirms, in Ideology andTerror: a new form of government, a text written in 1953 and later added to the second edition of The Origins of Totalitarianism, in1958, that isolation is that impasse into which men are driven when the political sphere of their livesis destroyed. Isolated man who lost his place in the political realm of action is deserted by the world of things as well , if he is no longer recognized as homo faber but treated as an animal laborans whose necessary'metabolism with nature' is of concern of no one. Isolation then become loneliness. Loneliness, the common ground forterror, the essence of totalitarian government, and for ideology or logicality, the preparation of itsexecutioners and victims, is closely connected with uprootedness and superfluousness which havebeen the curse of modern masses since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and havebecome acute with the rise of imperialism at the end of the last century and the break-down ofpolitical institutions and social traditions in our own time . To be uprooted means to have no place in the world, recognized and guaranteed by others; to be superfluous means not to belong to the world at all .17The historical process of converting the homo faber, the prototype of the human being as the creator of durable objects andinstitutions, into the animal laborans and, later on, into the homo sacer, can be retraced in Arendtian terms to the nineteenth centurywave of imperialist colonization. In this process, European countries imposed well-planned administrativegenocide in African territories as a means of domination and exploitation. As argued in the second volumeof The Origins of Totalitarianism, European colonialist countries combined racism and bureaucracy andthus promoted the most terrible massacres in recent history, the Boers' extermination of theHottentot tribes, the wild murdering by Carl Peters in German Southeast Africa, the decimation ofthe peaceful Congo population - from 20 to 40 million reduced to 8 million people; and finally,perhaps the worst of all, it resulted in the triumphant introduction of such means of pacificationinto ordinary, respectable foreign policies18 . This vital equation between protecting anddestroying life was also at the core of the two World Wars, as well as in many other localwarlike conflicts, in the course of which whole populations have become stateless ordeprived of a free political space. It is more than symptomatic that, in spite of all their structural political differences,the United States of Roosevelt, the Soviet Russia of Stalin, the Nazi Germany of Hitler and theFascist Italy of Mussolini were all conceived of as States devoted to the production andreproduction of the needs of the national animal laborans. According to Agamben, since our contemporarypolitics does not recognizes no other value than life, Nazism and Fascism, that is, regimes which have takenbare life as its supreme political criterion, are bound to remain unfortunatelytimely. 19 Finally, it is quite obvious that this same vital logic of enforcing and annihilating life still continues to be effective bothin post-industrial and in underdeveloped countries, since economic growth depends on the increase ofunemployment and on many forms of political exclusion.When politics is reduced to the tasks of enforcing, preserving and promoting life and happiness ofthe animal laborans it really does not matter if those objectives require increasingly violent acts,both in national and international milieus. Therefore, it should not be surprising if today the legality or illegality of theState's violent acts have become a secondary aspect in political discussions, since what really matters is to protect and stimulate thelife of the National (or, depending on the case, Western) animal laborans. In order to maintain the sacrosanct ideals ofincreased mass production and increased mass consumerism developed countries can ignore thefinite character of natural reserves that can jeopardize the future of humanity and thus refuse tosign International Protocols regarding the conservation of natural resources and diminishing theemission of dangerous polluting gases. They can also launch preventive humanitarian attacks,interventions or wars, disregard basic civil rights everywhere, create detention camps thatescape all legislation, like Guantanamo20, enforce the Airport jails where suspects are keptincommunicable, or multiply refugee camps for those who no longer have a homeland orhave been evacuated from zones of conflict. Some countries have even imprisoned whole populations in ghettosor built up concrete walls to physically isolate them from other communities and thus give rise to new forms of social, political andeconomical apartheid. In short, there are countries that can allow themselves to impose the highest level ofviolence possible against suspect individuals or political regimes - the so-called 'rogue-countries',les tats voyous21 - which, in one way or another, supposedly interfere with the security,maintenance and growth of their own national life cycle. If, according to Arendt, the common world is theinstitutional in-between space that should survive the natural cycle of life and death of human generations, what happens in modernmass societies based on continuous laboring and consuming activities is the progressive abolition of the institutional artificial barriersthat separate and protect the human world from the forces of nature.22 This is what explains the contemporarysensation of vertigo, instability and unhappiness, as well as the impossibility of combiningstability and novelty in order to think and act in a politically creative way.23 However, what should not bemissed in the Arendtian argument is that in the context of a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured anddiscarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end24, it becomes not onlypossible, but also necessary, that people be taken as raw material ready to be consumed, discarded or annihilated. Therefore,when Arendt announces the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safefrom consumption and annihilation through consumption25, we should also remember that humanannihilation, elevated to the status of a supreme and managed end in totalitarian regimes, stillcontinues to occur, although in different degrees and by different methods, in the contemporary dark holes of the oblivion suchas miserably poor Third World neighborhoods and Penitentiaries, underpaid and infra-human labor camps, not to mention slave laborcamps, always in the name of protecting the vital interests of the animal laborans.To talk about the process of human consumption is not to employ a metaphoric language but toproperly describe the matter in question. Heidegger had already realized it when in the notes written during the latethirties and later published under the title of Overcoming Metaphysics. In these notes he stated that the differences betweenwar and peace had already been blurred in a society in which metaphysical man, the animalrationale, gets fixed as the laboring animal, so that labor is now reaching the metaphysical rank of the unconditionalobjectification of everything present.26 Heidegger had also already understood that once the world becomesfully determined by the cyclical 'circularity of consumption for the sake of consumption' it is atthe brink of becoming an 'unworld' (Unwelt), since man, who no longer conceals his character ofbeing the most important raw material, is also drawn into the process. Man is 'the most important rawmaterial' because he remains the subject of all consumption27. After the Second World War and the dissemination of detailedinformation concerning the death factories Heidegger pushed his criticisms even further, since he thenacknowledged that even the understanding of man in terms of both subject and object of theconsumption process was inadequate to describe the whole process of planned mass annihilation . He then came to understand this process of human mass dehumanization in terms of the conversion of man into nothing more than an 'item of the reserve fund for the fabrication of corpses' (Bestandsstcke eines Bestandes der Fabrikation von Leichen), always ready to be manipulated, managed and destined to technological production and destruction. What happened in the'extermination camps' (Vernichtungslger) was not that millions of people met death as their own mostfundamental possibility; much to the contrary, their essential possibility of dying was definitelystolen from them and they merely 'passed away' in the process of being 'unconspicuouslyliquidated' (unauffllig liquidiert).28 Men as an animal laborans (Arendt), as homo sacer (Agamben), as an item of the reservefund (Heidegger) are descriptions of the very same process of dehumanization by means of which humankind and human life arereduced to the lowest status of living and unqualified raw material. As argued by Agamben, when it becomes impossible todifferentiate between bios and zoe, that is, when bare and unqualified life is transformed into a qualified form of life29, we can thenrecognize the emergence of a biopolitical epoch in which States promote the animalization of man by policies that aim at bothprotecting and destroying human life. Such considerations favor Agamben's thesis concerning thewidespread presence of the homo sacer in the contemporary world: if it is true that un-sacrificiallife is the figure that our time proposes to us, although life has become eliminable in anunprecedented measure, then the bare life of the homo sacer concerns us in a particular way. Iftoday there is not a single predetermined figure of the sacrificial man, perhaps that is because allof us have virtually become homines sacri.30By discussing the changes in the way power was conceived of and exercised at the turn of the nineteen-century, Foucault hadfirstly realized that when life turned out to be a constitutive political element, one that had to becarefully managed, calculated, ruled and normalized by means of different caring policies,giving rise to biopolitical measures, these policies soon became murderous ones. When the Sovereign'sactions became destined to promote and stimulate the growth of life beyond the task of merely imposing violent death, wars turnedinto more and more bloodshed and extermination became a regular procedure both within and outside of the Nation. After theconstitution of the modern biopolitical paradigm, says Foucault, political conflicts aim at preserving and intensifying the life of thewinners, so that enemies cease to be political opponents and come to be seen as biological entities: it is not enough to defeat them,they must be exterminated since they constitute risks to the health of the race, people or community. Foucault thuscharacterizes the historical consequences that the emergence and consolidation of the modernbiopolitical paradigm implied at the turn to the nineteen-century: death that was based on theright of the sovereign is now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social body toensure, maintain or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as they have been since thenineteenth-century, and all things being equal, never before did regimes visit such holocausts ontheir own populations. But this formidable power of death now presents itself as thecounterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence on life that endeavors to administer,optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations.Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged onbehalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose ofwholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital . It is asmanagers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able towage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. And through a turn that closes the circle, as thetechnology of wars have caused them to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, thedecision that initiates them and the one that terminates them are in fact increasinglyinformed by the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end of point of this process: thepower to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee anindividual's continued existence. The principle underlying the tactics of battle - that one hasto be capable of killing in order to go on living - has become the principle that defines thestrategy of states. But the existence in case is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty; atstake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeed the dream of modernpowers, this is not because of a recent return of the ancient right to kill; it is because power issituated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena ofpopulation..31Thus, under the biopolitical paradigm the other's death is not only merely my life, in the sense of mypersonal security; the other's death, the death of the bad race, of the inferior race (or of thedegenerated or abnormal), is what will render life in general saner; saner and more pure32 In OnViolence, Arendt argued a similar thesis concerning the violent character of racist or naturalist conceptions of politics. According toArendt, nothing could be theoretically more dangerous than the tradition of organic thought in political matters, in which power andviolence are interpreted in terms of biological metaphors that can only induce and produce more violence, especially where racialmatters are involved. Racism as an ideological system of thought is inherently violent and murderousbecause it attacks natural organic data that, as such, cannot be changed by any power orpersuasion, so that all that can be done when conflicts become radicalized is to exterminate theother.33 Biopolitical violence, the specific character of different violent phenomena underlyingboth totalitarianism and the quasi-totalitarian elements of modern mass democracies, is the tragicinheritance sustained by all kinds of naturalized conceptions of the political. According to her views, allforms of naturalizing the political harm the egalitarian political artificiality without which no defense and 'validation of humanfreedom and dignity' are possible. It was the analysis of the terrible experience of both political andeconomic refugees, of those interned in different kinds of concentration camps, of those left withno home and all those who have lost their own place in the world, that showed her that nature -and, of course, human nature - cannot ground and secure any right or any democratic politics. Sheherself suffered the consequences of being left with no homeland between 1933 and 1951. This denial of any rightswhatsoever showed her the paradox that the naturalistic understanding and foundation of theRights of Man implied, since once those rights ceased to be recognized and enforced by apolitical community, their unalienable character simply vanished, living unprotected exactlythose very human beings that mostly needed them: The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to beunenforceable whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of a sovereign state.34The core of her argument is that the loss of the Rights of Man did not per se deprive a humanbeing of his/her life, liberty, property, equality before the law, freedom of expression or thepursuit of happiness; the real 'calamity' was that people in these circumstances no longer belongto any community whatsoever. Their plight is not that they are not equal before the law, but that no law exists for them35.In other words, nationalistic and racialized biopolitics has produced a huge mass of people thathave no access to what Arendt has called as the right to have rights insofar as they have beenstripped of their right to belong to some kind of organized community: Man, it turns out, can lose all so-called Rights of Man without losing his essential quality as man, his human dignity. Only the loss of a polity itself expels him fromhumanity36. The abstract nakedness of merely being a human being is not a trustful substitute for the artificial character of all thepacts freely consented to by active citizens. By analyzing the dynamic of the extermination camps, Arendt understood that humanitygoes far beyond the notion of the human being a mere natural living being with its minimum natural denominator: human beings canbe transformed into specimens of the human animal, and that man's 'nature' is only 'human' insofar as it opens up to man thepossibility of becoming something highly unnatural, that is, a man37. In other words, humanity, when it is politically understood,does not reside in the natural fact of being alive, since human beings depend on artificial legal and political institutions to protectthem. The Arendtian rejection of understanding the human being as a living being in the singular,as well as her postulation of human plurality as the condition of all innovative politics depend onher thesis that politics has to do with the formation of a common world in the course of people'sacting and exchanging opinions. Politics depends on the human capacities to agree and disagree, so that everything that ismysteriously given to us by nature becomes politically irrelevant. For Arendt, equality is not a natural gift, but a political constructionoriented by the principle of justice. In other words, political equality is the result of agreements through which people decide togrant themselves equal rights, since the political sphere is based on the assumption that equality can be forged by those who act andexchange opinions among themselves and thus change the world in which they live in.38 According to Arendt, there can be nodemocratic politics worthy of the name unless everyone, regardless of their nationality, is included in the political and economiccommunity of a definite State intending to recognize and protect them as their citizens; otherwise, no human being can discoverhis/her own place in the world. Agamben's thesis goes even further than Arendt's in detecting the perplexities inherent to thetraditional foundation of the Rights of Man. By following up and radicalizing Arendt's reflections, he discovers in the text of theDeclaration of the Rights of Man a fundamental piece of modern biopolitics since these rights constitute the very inscription of nakedlife into the political-juridical order. According to Agamben, in the Declarations of the Rights of Man of 1789natural bare life is both the foundational source and the carrier of the rights of man, since theman's bare life - or, more precisely, the very fact of being born in a certain territory - is the element thateffects the transition from the Ancient regime's principle of divine sovereignty to modern sovereignty concentrated in the Nation-State:It is not possible to understand the development as well as the national and biopolitical 'vocation'of the National-State in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, if one forgets that in its own basiswe find out not man as the free and conscious subject but, mostly, man's bare life, the mere factof being born, which, in the transition from the ancient subject to the citizen, was invested as suchas the principle of sovereignty.39To conclude this text, I would like to emphasize that Arendt's main reflections concerning totalitarianism still remain relevantnowadays, especially when directed towards the feebleness of actually existing democracies. The core of Arendt's diagnosis of thepresent is that whenever politics has mostly to do with the maintenance and increase of the vital metabolism of affluent Nation-states,it will be indispensable to reduce the animal laborans to the even more degrading status of thehomo sacer, of bare and unprotected life that can be delivered to oblivion and to death . Ouractual understanding of politics as the administrative promotion of abundance and thehappiness of the human being as an animal laborans has as its correlates economic andpolitical exclusion, prejudices, violence and genocides against the naked life of the homosacer . I also believe that Arendt can shed light on our current dilemmas, providing us theoretical elements for a critical diagnosis ofthe present as well as for the opening of new possibilities for collective action in the world. Arendt was a master of chiaroscuropolitical thinking in the sense that she was never blind to the contrasts between the open possibilities of radically renovating thepolitical and the strict chains of a logic that binds violence and political exclusion under a biopolitical paradigm. If we still wantto remain with Arendt, then we have to attentively think and consciously seek to participate innew spaces and new forms of life devoted to political association, action and discussion,wherever and whenever they seem to subvert the tediously multiplication of the same in its manydifferent everyday manifestations. Arendt did not want to propose any political utopia but nor was she convinced that ourpolitical dilemmas had no other possible outcome, as if history had come to a tragic end. Neither a pessimist nor an optimist, she onlywanted to understand the world in which she lived in and to stimulate us to continue thinking and acting in the present. At least, if aradically new political alternative can still come to be in our world, the responsibility for it willalways be ours. Therefore, if we wish to remain faithful to the spirit of Arendt's political thinking,then we should think and act politically without constraining our thinking and acting to anypreviously defined understanding of what politics 'is' or 'should' be. In other words, the political challenge ofthe present is to multiply the forms, possibilities and spaces in which we can perform our political actions. These can be strategicactions destined to enforce political agendas favored by political parties concerned with social justice. They can also bediscrete, subversive actions favored by small groups at the margins of the bureaucratized partymachines that promote political intervention free of teleological or strategic intents, since theirgoal is to sustain an intense and radical politicization of existence. Finally, there are also actions inwhich ethical openness towards otherness becomes fully political: small and rather inconspicuousactions of acknowledging, welcoming, and extending hospitality and solidarity towards others. K PriorRecognizing our own culpability for violence is a prerequisite to addressingthe affs impacts.Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University ofWollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture, University of Wollongong, Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian law in black and white, ResearchOnline, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123-146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)

Reappraisal of the role of the political subject of suffering opens the way to a new approach to thevicious circle of white responsibility: black suffering. Pace Pearson, it is not white guilt thatconstitutes black victimhood. Indigenous people suffer as a result of historical and socialconditions, yet they are represented as suffering in a biopolitical space outside the norms of theAustralian polity and its legal framework. Recognising white responsibility for colonial andpostcolonial injustices, right up to the amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act proposed atthe end of 2009, does not deprive Aboriginal people of their responsibility, social cohesion orwill. That is perpetrated by precisely those laws that treat the Indigenous population asirresponsible, as existing in a lawless state of suffering and victimhood.Let us be more explicit about the sources of Indigenous desaffiliation, the short French term thatdenotes the weakening of intersubjective supports. This was caused by an active process ofcolonisation and detachment of people from their land, their laws and their families andcommunities. Recognition of these causes and conditions does not lead inevitably to a paralysisof guilt, nor need it lead to paternalistic policies that seek to oversee the demise of the race or tosupervise the parenting practices of entire communities (under white guidance). This recognitionindicates priorities for both Indigenous and settler communities. Overcoming alienation andreestablishing intersubjective supports cannot be imposed on or offered to a community fromoutside. It must be an autonomous and continuing organising process. Members of the settlersociety must remember what it is they are sorry for, and to have sufficient understanding of theirwrongs and the damage caused to ensure that they are not repeated. This will include remindingthe parliaments of the nation (Rudd, 2008: 170) who, in the present situation, seem so prone toethical amnesia. Indigenous communities need the freedom to fight alienation and the resourcesto support themselves and each other.The discourse of suffering does not only offer insights into the constitution of the political subjectwho suffers. As the Australian case indicates, the other of the sufferers is likewise constitutedby their position in relation to the sufferers, including their responsibility for the suffering, or theadvantages they have gained from dispossession. The significance of the word sorry wascharacteristic of the construction of complementary identities of a community of sufferersand of a responsible collective. By adopting the position that the settler community as awhole should apologise to the Indigenous community, the former acknowledged their partin the destructive impact on Indigenous societies.Since the major impact of the policies of child removal had been on the intersubjective tiesbetween Indigenous people, the apology was most relevant to the type of suffering that Renaultcalls desaffiliation. The suffering caused by dispossession and domination was not explicitlyaddressed. While it may have been a sub-text of the demand for an apology, questions of materialloss and benefit were always carefully shielded from the discourse. It has already been mentionedthat the Prime Minister expressly avoided any commitment to reparations, and the entire debatewas about stolen children, not stolen land. The question of land is more sensitive for whitesociety, since any serious effort to redress that injustice may affect their property. The question ofland rights, through court cases, political conflicts and legislation, notably during the 1990s, isanother major chapter in the history of Australia (Yunupingu, 1997; Motha, 1998; McNamara andGrattan 1999). While it goes to the heart of dispossession, it cannot be retold here.The domination suffered by Indigenous people is effected in large part by the operation of law,and the law itself is the foundation of the nations legitimacy. That legitimacy continues to bedisputed, despite the universal claims of the Australian common law, since the prior Aboriginallaws were never recognised. This is the suffering that never can be recognised within thescope of a legal system obsessed with its self- referential legitimacy (Veitch, 2007: 112-4).The law making practices of the parliaments of the nation continue to draw on a rhetoric ofsuffering and responsibility while reinforcing their legitimacy through incessant legislating andstory telling. At the same time that those laws and stories purport to represent the originaloccupants of the territory, they work to legitimate their own domination over them. This iswhere we find the wreckage of law as a means to redress suffering or to enforce responsibility.The laws of Australia continue to exist in the shadows of legitimacy, with the Aboriginal laws ofthe land lying beneath like an unstable geological layer, the shifting sands beneath a modernpolity. As the narratives of suffering and identity, of White Australia and its Black Historyproliferate, the communities are themselves constituted by discourses of suffering andresponsibility. These can contribute to the developing self- awareness of Australian society aslong as they can be recognised as competing legitimacy stories, while the underlying conditionsof dispossession, domination and the destruction of intersubjective supports are still visible,through Indigenous stories,10 under the elaborately coded and codified mantle that we keepweaving. It is only through conscientious recognition of our own responsibility that we maydevelop as political subjects and recognise others in all their own subjectivity. AT PermutationThe permutation is incoherent A. Framework means perms arent responsive this is a disad to theirmethod our links prove that the 1ACs depictions of suffering areproblematic and reinscribe violence.B. They cant sever their representations (1) severance makes the aff amoving target which allows them to shift out of the negatives best offense undermines competitive equity. (2) Thats another link severance is thelogic which justifies bailing out on helping the subaltern after narratives ofsuffering are presented.C. Their attempts to incorporate criticims of their ideology while endorsingthe ethics of the 1ac is emblematic of liberal violence and prevents alternativepolitical discussions and fails to question dominant ideologies. Only a totalrejection of the 1acs representations creates sites of resistance.Abbas 10 (Asma, Professor and Division Head in Social Studies, Political Science, Philosophyat the Liebowitz Center for International Studies, Liberalism and Human Suffering: MaterialistReflections on Politics, Ethics, and Aesthetics, Palgrave Macmillion)

The dizzying back and forth between professed Kantians and Humeans blurs the fact that,regardless of whether morality is anchored interior to the acting subject or determined by theeffects of the actions of the subject as they play out in the outside world, the unit of analysis isquite the same. Thus, when touchy liberals desire better attention to the fact of human painand suffering, they manage to talk about cruelty where, ironically, cruel actions arederivatives of cruel agents and the victims suffering is just fallout.Besides this shared inability to dispel the primacy of the agent and the perpetrator in favor of thesufferer of pain, the rift between Kant and Hume is deceptive in another way. In terms ofhistorical evolution, the current status of cruelty betrays a fetish of the active agent. It is noaccident that the terms good and evil require a focus on cruelty and its infliction, leavinguntouched the suffering of cruelty. Moral psychology ends up being the psychology of cruelty,which is a moral question, and hence of those who cause it. In the same frame, suffering is nevera moral, let alone political or legal, question unless a moral agent with a conscience has caused it.All sufferers automatically become victims in the eyes of politics and law when recognized. Suffering is thus relevant as a political question only after it is a moral one, when it isembodied and located in a certain way, when it surpasses arbitrary thresholds.It is one thing to claim that liberalism, whether empiricist or idealist, cannot overcome its subject-centeredness even in its moments of empathy for the victim. It is another to understand thestubborn constitution of the agent at the helm of liberal justice and ask what makes it so incurableand headstrong and what the temperament of this stubbornness might be: is it pathetic, squishy,helplessly compas- sionate, humble, philanthropic, imperialist, venomous, neurotic, all of theabove, or none of these? Not figuring out this pathos is bound to reduce all interaction with liberalassertions to one or another act of editing or correcting them. Inadvertently, all protests toliberalism tread a limited, predictable path and will be, at some point, incorporated within it.Liberalisms singular gall and violence is accessed every time a resistance to it isaccommodated by liberalism. Think, for instance, not only of how often liberals affirm theirclumsiness and mediocrity in speaking for the others suffering but also of how quickly itsantagonistspurveyors of many a righteous anti-representational politicsmake space for thevoice of others without challenging the (liberal, colonizing) structures that determine anddistribute the suffering and speaking self, and the suffering and speaking other, to begin with.This protest leaves unquestioned what it means to speak for ones own, or others, sufferingand whether there are other ways of speaking suffering that problematize these as the onlyoptions. Link AutobiographyPresentations of autobiography get subsumed within dominant culture andfail to make broader cultural or political change; it innately priveleges theliterate and articulate while commodifying their narrative and fails to givethe majority of outsiders any agency.Coughlin 95 (Anne, Associate Professor of Law at the Vanderbilt Law School, Regulating theSelf: Autobiographical Performances in Outsider Scholarship, 81 Va. L. Rev. 1229)

Although Williams is quick to detect insensitivity and bigotry in remarks made by strangers,colleagues, and friends, her taste for irony fails her when it comes to reflection on her relationshipwith her readers and the material benefits that her autobiographical performances have earned forher. Perhaps William should be more inclined to thank, rather than reprimand, her editors forbehaving as readers of autobiography invariably do. When we examine this literary faux pas - theincongruity between Williams's condemnation of her editors and the professional benefits theirpublications secured her we detect yet another contradiction between the outsiders' use ofautobiography and their desire to transform culture radically. Lejeune's characterization ofautobiography as a "contract" reminds us that autobiography is a lucrative commodity. In ourculture, members of the reading public avidly consume personal stories, which surely explainswhy first-rate law journals and academic presses have been eager to market outsider narratives.No matter how unruly the self that it records, an autobiographical performance transforms thatself into a form of "property in a moneyed economy" and into a valuable intellectual asset in anacademy that requires its members to publish. Accordingly, we must be skeptical of the assertionthat the outsiders splendid publication record is itself sufficient evidence of the success of theirendeavor.Certainly, publication of a best seller may transform its authors life, with the resultingcommercial success and academic renown. As one critic of autobiography puts it, failures donot get published. While writing a successful autobiography may be momentous for theindividual author, this success has a limited impact on culture. Indeed, the transformation ofoutsider authors into success stories subverts outsiders radical intentions by constitutingthem as exemplary participants within contemporary culture, willing to market eventhemselves to literary and academic consumers. What good does this transformation do foroutsiders who are less fortunate and less articulate than middle-class law professors? Althoughthey style themselves cultural critics, the storytellers do not reflect on the meaning of their owncommercial success, nor ponder its entanglement with the cultural values they claim to resist.Rather, for the most part, they seem content simply to take advantage of the peculiarly Americanlicense, identified by Professor Sacvan Bercovitch, to have your dissent and make it too. Link Empathic IdentificationThe affirmatives use of empathic identification commodifies the sufferingof the other the ravaged subject is commodified to create an economy ofpleasure and pain, a frame of reference upon which dominant ideologiessustain themselves.Berlant 99 (Lauren, George M. Pullman Professor in the Department of English in theUniversity of Chicago, The Subject of True Feeling: Pain, Privacy and Politics, in CulturalPluralism, Identity Politics, and the Law ed., Sarat Kearns, Ann Arbor: University of MichiganPress, Pg. 49 54)

Ravaged wages and ravaged bodies saturate the global marketplace in which the United Statesseeks desperately to compete competitively, as the euphemism goes, signifying a race that will be won by thenation whose labor conditions are most optimal for profit. In the United States the media of the political public

sphere regularly register new scandals of the proliferating sweatshop networks at home and abroad, which has to be a good thing, because it produces feeling and with it something at leastakin to consciousnessi that can lead to action.Yet, even as the image of the traumatized worker proliferates, even as evidence of exploitation isfound under every rock or commodity, it competes with a normative/utopian image of the U.S.citizen who remains unmarked, framed, and protected by the private trajectory of his life project,which is sanctified at the juncture where the unconscious meets history: the American Dream. 4 Inthat story one's identity is not borne of suffering, mental, physical, or economic. If the U.S. worker is lucky enough to live at aneconomic moment that sustains the Dream, he gets to appear at his least national when he is working and at his most national atleisure, with his family or in semipublic worlds of other men producing surplus manliness (e.g., via sports). In the Americandreamscape his identity is private property, a zone in which structural obstacles and culturaldifferences fade into an ether of prolonged, deferred, and individuating enjoyment that he hasearned and that the nation has helped him to earn. Meanwhile, exploitation only appears as ascandalous nugget in the sieve of memory when it can be condensed into an exotic thing ofmomentary fascination, a squalor of the bottom too horrible to be read in its own actual banality.The exposed traumas of workers in ongoing extreme conditions do not generally induce morethan mourning on the part of the state and the public culture to whose feeling-based opinions thestate is said to respond. Mourning is what happens when a grounding object is lost, is dead, no longer living (to you).Mourning is an experience of irreducible boundedness: I am here, I am living, he is dead, I ammourning. It is a beautiful, not sublime, experience of emancipation: mourning supplies the subject thedefinitional perfection of a being no longer in flux. It takes place over a distance: even if theobject who induces the feeling of loss and helplessness is neither dead nor at any greatdistance from where you are . 5 In other words, mourning can also be an act of aggression, of socialdeathmaking: it can perform the evacuation of significance from actually-existing subjects. Evenwhen liberals do it, one might say, "others" are ghosted for a good cause. 6 The sorrow songs of scandalthat sing of the exploitation that is always "elsewhere" (even a few blocks away) are in this senseaggressively songs of mourning. Play them backward, and the military march of capitalist triumphalism (The Trans-Nationale) can be heard. Its lyric, currently crooned by every organ of record in the United States, is about necessity. It exhortscitizens to understand that the "bottom line"7 of national life is neither utopia nor freedom butsurvival, which can only be achieved by a citizenry that eats its anger, makes no unreasonableclaims on resources or control over value, and uses its most creative energy to cultivate intimatespheres while scrapping a life together flexibly in response to the market world's caprice. 8In this particular moment of expanding class unconsciousness that looks like consciousnessemerges a peculiar, though not unprecedented, hero: the exploited child. If a worker can beinfantilized, pictured as young, as small, as feminine or feminized, as starving, as bleeding anddiseased, and as a (virtual) slave, the righteous indignation around procuring his survivalresounds everywhere. The child must not be sacrificed to states or to profiteering. His wounded image speaks atruth that subordinates narrative: he has not "freely" chosen his exploitation; the optimism andplay that are putatively the right of childhood have been stolen from him. Yet only "voluntary"steps are ever taken to try to control this visible sign of what is ordinary and systemic amidthe chaos of capitalism, in order to make its localized nightmares seem uninevitable .Privatize the atrocity, delete the visible sign, make it seem foreign. Return the child to the family,replace the children with adults who can look dignified while being paid virtually the samerevolting wage. The problem that organizes so much feeling then regains livable proportions, and the uncomfortable pressure offeeling dissipates, like so much gas. Meanwhile, the pressure of feeling the shock of being uncomfortablypolitical produces a cry for a double therapy-to the victim and the viewer. But before "we" appear toocomplacently different from the privileged citizens who desire to caption the mute image of exotic suffering with an aversivelyfascinated mourning (a desire for the image to be dead, a ghost), we must note that this feeling culture crosses over intoother domains, the domains of what we call identity politics, where the wronged take up voiceand agency to produce transformative testimony, which depends on an analogous conviction about the self-evidenceand therefore the objectivity of painful feeling. The central concern of this essay is to address the place of painful feeling in themaking of political worlds. In particular, I mean to challenge a powerful popular belief in the positive workings of something I callnational sentimentality, a rhetoric of promise that a nation can be built across fields of socialdifference through channels of affective identification and empathy. Sentimental politicsgenerally promotes and maintains the hegemony of the national identity form, no mean featin the face of continued widespread intercultural antagonism and economic cleavage . Butnational sentimentality is more than a current of feeling that circulates in a political field: thephrase describes a longstanding contest between two models of u.S. citizenship. In one, the classicmodel, each citizen's value is secured by an equation between abstractness and emancipation: a cell of national identity providesjuridically protected personhood for citizens regardless of anything specific about them. In the second model, which was initiallyorganized around labor, feminist, and antiracist struggles of the nineteenth-century United States, another version of the nation isimagined as the index of collective life. This nation is peopled by suffering citizens and noncitizens whosestructural exclusion from the utopian-American dreamscape exposes the state's claim oflegitimacy and virtue to an acid wash of truth telling that makes hegemonic disavowal virtuallyimpossible, at certain moments of political intensity. Sentimentality has long been the means bywhich mass subaltern pain is advanced, in the dominant public sphere, as the true core of nationalcollectivity. It operates when the pain of intimate others burns into the conscience ofclassically privileged national subjects, such that they feel the pain of flawed or deniedcitizenship as their pain . Theoretically, to eradicate the pain those with power will do whatever isnecessary to return the nation once more to its legitimately utopian odor. Identification with pain, auniversal true feeling, then leads to structural social change. In return, subalterns scarred by the pain of faileddemocracy will reauthorize universalist notions of citizenship in the national utopia, whichinvolves believing in a redemptive notion of law as the guardian of public good. The object of the nationand the law in this light is to eradicate systemic social pain, the absence of which becomes the definition of freedom. Yet, sincethese very sources of protection-the state, the law, patriotic ideology-have traditionally buttressedtraditional matrices of cultural hierarchy, and since their historic job has been to protect universalsubject/citizens from feeling their cultural and corporeal specificity as a political vulnerability,the imagined capacity of these institutions to assimilate to the affective tactics of subalterncounterpolitics suggests some weaknesses, or misrecognitions, in these tactics. For one thing, it may bethat the sharp specificity of the traumatic model of pain implicitly mischaracterizes what aperson is as what a person becomes in the experience of social negation; this model alsofalsely promises a sharp picture of structural violence's source and scope, in turnpromoting a dubious optimism that law and other visible sources of inequality, for example,can provide the best remedies for their own taxonomizing harms. It is also possible thatcounterhegemonic deployments of pain as the measure of structural injustice actually sustain theutopian image of a homogeneous national metaculture, which can look like a healed orhealthy body in contrast to the scarred and exhausted ones . Finally, it might be that the tactical use oftrauma to describe the effects of social inequality so overidentifies the eradication of pain withthe achievement of justice that it enables various confusions: for instance, the equation of pleasurewith freedom or the sense that changes in feeling, even on a mass scale, amount to substantialsocial change. Sentimental politics makes these confusions credible and these violencesbearable, as its cultural power confirms the centrality of interpersonal identification andempathy to the vitality and viability of collective life. This gives citizens something to do inresponse to overwhelming structural violence . Meanwhile, by equating mass society with that thing called"national culture," these important transpersonal linkages and intimacies all too frequently serve as proleptic shields, as ethicallyuncontestable legitimating devices for sustaining the hegemonic field.9 Link EmpowermentDiscourse of empowerment reinforce the legitimacy of antidemocraticpolitics and reinscribe the domination of the sovereign; rather, self-alienationallows for a refusal to engage in colonial institutions that creates truepolitical agency while denying passivity.Mohr 10 (Richard, Director of the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University ofWollongong, Australia, and Managing Editor of Law Text Culture, University of Wollongong, Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian law in black and white, ResearchOnline, e-Cardanos CES, 7 123-146, accessed 7/26 //RJ)

Domination, disadvantage and dispossession may be manifested or experienced as victimhood.

Though it is not constituted by or constitutive of white guilt, there are mutual relationshipsbetween the political subjectivities of the dominated and the dominating, the dispossessed and thepossessor. Australian debates over responsibility, redistribution policies, collective identity andrace relations now bring intellectuals, activists, political parties and social movements togetheracross racial lines to contest the fundamental terms in which the communities understandthemselves and each other. These are some of the practices, names and narratives (Gatti, 2010)that constitute identities in a single territory that was colonised but never ceded by the firstnations. This analysis recognises these constitutive foundations of identity formation, takingaccount of political, economic and historical conditions and the stories that are told about them. Itrequires understanding white responsibility for specific injustices, without automatically castingthose who have suffered from them as passive victims. The narratives of nation can only beeffectively told if they are developed as a dialogue.Passivity arises when the discourse of suffering imagines a victim of suffering, posed against anactive dominant group that represents those sufferers, as discussed in the previous section. WendyBrown criticises movements that simplyperform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the organization of the activitythrough which the suffering is produced and without addressing the subject constitution thatdomination effects, that is, the constitution of the social categories, workers, blacks, women,[...] (Brown, 1995: 7)The problem, then, is to recognise and allocate responsibility for suffering under conditions thatallow those who suffer to constitute and imagine themselves as political subjects. It is only in thisway that we can avoid their simplistic representation as biopolitical or even biological objects.Renault (2008: 372) calls attention to a critique that began with Gramsci as an analysis of thebarriers to the development of the worker as a revolutionary subject. The critique is continued bythose contemporary figures who explicitly pose the question of political subjectivity as aproblem, and Renault names Balibar, Butler, Zizek inter alia.Renault points out that the three forms of suffering, domination, deprivation and desaffiliation,have been characterised by specific political movements, through which participants haveconstituted themselves as political subjects in various ways according to their times andcircumstances. While the industrial proletariats struggles against domination were seen as amodel of political resistance from the nineteenth into the mid twentieth century, the struggles ofpeasants and other extremely poor people against deprivation were less developed, or at least lessfully theorised and constructed by Marxist theory. Renault (2008: 33) refers to the more recentmovements of Indigenous and landless interests (specifically in Bolivia and Brazil) as models thathave become better recognised for their struggles against dispossession.Recognition that the constitution of subjectivity is one of the key obstacles to an effectiveresponse to suffering refocuses attention on desaffiliation. If suffering is in large part a problemof powerlessness and the social construction of victimhood, then clearly desaffiliation is a keycategory of analysis. So, if resistance is the active response to domination, and if appropriation isthe active response to deprivation, how can one respond actively to desaffiliation?Dass analysis of Bhopal indicated that the reduction of those who suffer to the status of passiveand silent victims is a process of disempowerment. The natural response, then, would be to callfor their empowerment. Yet we must be careful with what we mean by this fashionable word(Burgi, 2009: 26). Brown contrasts empowerment, as a means of generating one's capacities...without capitulating to constraints by particular regimes of power, to resistance [which]implicitly acknowledges the extent to which protest always transpires inside the regime (1995:22). Yet even though the term opens up more possibilities than the reactive notion of resistance,and articulates that feature of freedom concerned with action, there are dangers in the way itimagines subjectivity. Indeed, the possibility that one can feel empowered without being soforms an important element of legitimacy for the antidemocratic dimensions of liberalism.(Brown, 1995: 23)If empowerment is to enable the engagement of active political subjects with the objectivesocial conditions of their suffering, then we need to reengage with the concept of alienation.Social suffering, for Renault (2008: 387), is characterised by structures that block the satisfactionof needs, both organic (psychic and corporeal) and intersubjective needs. The resulting self-alienation requires a realisation of self by engaging with those conditions, or as Brown would putit, organization of the activity through which the suffering is produced (1995: 7). Link MulticulturalismThe affirmatives focus on cultural tolerance ignores the exploitative socialstructures that creates difference in the first place; their absolute focus oninclusion necessarily excludes the Other from participating in politics.Zizek 07 (Slavoj, Critical Inquiry Autumn 2007, Tolerance as an Ideological Category,http://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry.html)

Why are today so many problems perceived as problems of intolerance, not as problems ofinequality, exploitation, injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, not emancipation,political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer is the liberal multiculturalist'sbasic ideological operation: the "culturalization of politics" - political differences, differencesconditioned by political inequality, economic exploitation, etc., are naturalized/neutralized into"cultural" differences, different "ways of life," which are something given, something that cannotbe overcome, but merely "tolerated." To this, of course, one should answer in Benjaminian terms:from culturalization of politics to politicization of culture. The cause of this culturalization isthe retreat, failure, of direct political solutions (Welfare State, socialist projects, etc.).Tolerance is their post-political ersatz:The retreat from more substantive visions of justice heralded by the promulgation of tolerancetoday is part of a more general depoliticization of citizenship and power and retreat from politicallife itself. The cultivation of tolerance as a political end implicitly constitutes a rejection ofpolitics as a domain in which conflict can be productively articulated and addressed, adomain in which citizens can be transformed by their participation. [1]Perhaps, nothing expresses better the inconsistency of the post-political liberal project than itsimplicit paradoxical identification of culture and nature, the two traditional opposites: cultureitself is naturalized, posited as something given. (The idea of culture as "second nature" is, ofcourse, an old one.) It was, of course, Samuel Huntington who proposed the most successfulformula of this "culturalization of politics" by locating the main source of today's conflicts intothe "clash of civilizations," what one is tempted to call the Huntington's disease of our time - ashe put it, after the end of the Cold War, the "iron curtain of ideology" has been replaced bythe "velvet curtain of culture. [2] Huntington's dark vision of the "clash of civilizations" mayappear to be the very opposite of Francis Fukuyama's bright prospect of the End of History in theguise of a world-wide liberal democracy: what can be more different from Fukuyama's pseudo-Hegelian idea of the "end of history" (the final Formula of the best possible social order wasfound in capitalist liberal democracy, there is now no space for further conceptual progress, thereare just empirical obstacles to be overcome), [3] than Huntington's "clash of civilizations" as themain political struggle in the XXIst century? The "clash of civilizations" IS politics at the "end ofhistory." Link Racial IdentityThe presentation of racial identity into debate is a way for the community toassuage its guilt for being racist narratives of non-whiteness are exploitedand commodified to legitimize the white body you have an obligation toreject the commodification of racial identity.Leong 12 (Nancy, Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Racial Capitalism, Harvard Law Review, University of Texas)

A white person or institution who engages in an exchange with a non-white person, therefore,increases its status as a non- racist and cross-culturally competent actor by signaling thoseattributes through affiliation. Because we cannot, generally, probe the inner cognitive processesof a white individual for racist ideation or infiltrate the internal workplace culture of an institutionto detect racist norms, a white persons affiliation with a non-white individual serves as a proxyfor making independent judgments along those axes.162 Such affiliation signals to outsiders thatthe white person or institution is non-racist because, presumably, if they were racist, they wouldnot want to participate in the exchange with the non-white person, and the non-white personwould not agree to participate in the exchange with them. Such status-seeking explains theintensity of the drive to acquire the capital associated with non-whiteness through affiliation. Italso explains why non-whiteness is particularly desirable to market participants seekingeither to distinguish themselves favorably from other participants or simply to avoiddistinguishing themselves unfavorably.Real world examples reveal the status associated with affiliation with non-white people. First,closeness with non-white people allows whites to deflect charges of racism. As the popularsatirical blog Stuff White People Like163 puts it, Obviously, whites want black friends so as notto appear racist.164 One commentator has referred to this as the some of my best friendsdefense - the idea is that, if one has close non-white friends (or friends of other outsider groups)one cannot also be racist (or prejudiced against those groups). Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silvaidentified this defense as a common theme in a series of interviews with white people about racerelations, finding that, while whites harbor prejudice and resentment, a common tactic wasto shelter these views behind claims of having non-white friends and associates.166 Suchcapitalization of non-whiteness is valuable given the manifest undesirability of the racist label,which commentators have dubbed the only true equivalent to a racial epithet for white people.167The presentation of non-whiteness creates a system of racial capital byshowcasing the non-white body, whiteness reaffirms its supremacy andsolidifies its social power.Leong 12 (Nancy, Assistant Professor at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, Racial Capitalism, Harvard Law Review, University of Texas)

Yet showcasing a few select non-white employees does not actually require changing aworkplace culture in which most non- white individuals feel subtly unwelcome.200 Indeed,employers may actually preserve existing racial hierarchies by hiring and showcasing non-white employees. christi cunningham argues that the practice of tokenism . . . leveragesundervalued identities and preserves commodified values of race by parading an exception.201By showcasing non-white employees in prominent positions, employers signal that unsuccessfulnon-white employees are responsible for their own failures, while at the same time maintaining asystem in which white employees are in fact preferred.202Whether overtly furthering a companys reputation or more covertly maintaining the racial statusquo, showcasing does not actually require numerical diversity within a companys ranks to matchthe appearance of diversity in its leadership. But if an employer does acquire a numericallydiverse workforce, that non- white presence has additional instrumental value.First, numerical diversity yields racial capital by establishing and maintaining the companysgood reputation. Wilkins explains that diversity statistics are used to convey[] a reassuringmessage to law schools and the public at large that slow but nevertheless significant progress isbeing made on overcoming the legacy of [previous] racist and exclusionary practices.203Employers often features diversity statistics on their websites and in promotional materials as away of communicating that information as widely as possible.Moreover, the presence of non-white employees throughout an employers workforce adds racialcapital by providing a statistical defense against current litigation or preempting future litigation.For example, Wal-Mart recently undertook a well- publicized initiative to diversify its own ranksand to insist on diversity in its business partners.204 Wal-Mart has achieved some strikingnumerical results. It wrote to each of its top one hundred law firms, stating that to retain Wal-Mart as a client that firm had to demonstrate a meaningful interest in the importance of diversity; it also required each firm to submit a slate of candidates to serve as the relationship attorneywith Wal-Mart, with at least one female and one person of color on the slate.205 The initiativeresulted in changing forty relationship attorneys and shifting $60 million worth of Wal-Martslegal work to management by female or non-white attorneys.206These diversity measures have accompaniedand, we might infer, are designed to respond toawave of employment discrimination allegations against Wal-Mart. The company recentlysucceeded in securing dismissal of a class action brought by more than 1.5 million womenalleging sex discrimination in hiring and promotion.207 Several of the women who served as leadplaintiffs in Wal-Mart v. Dukes testified to racial as well as gender discrimination in theirdepositions.208 Wal-Mart also faced a smaller class-action lawsuit initiated by two black truckdrivers, alleging race discrimination in hiring.209 And the NAACPs 2005 Industry Survey gaveWal-Mart a grade of C minus within the areas of employment, vendor development,advertising/marketing, charitable giving and investing/franchising.210Regardless whether Wal-Mart committed race discrimination within the meaning of the law, itsdiversity initiatives have succeeded in protecting the companys image. The company hasreceived awards and considerable media praise for its efforts.211 And by affiliating itselfwith non-white employees and racially diverse business partners, Wal-Mart also insulates itselffrom future allegations of race discrimination. Racial capitalism yields valuable rewards: Wal-Marts diversity initiative may ultimately save the company billions of dollars in adversejury verdicts or litigation settlements.These examples illustrate the way that racial capitalism occurs within institutions. Thephenomenon is so common as to be unremarkable. But in the following Part, I will demonstratethat racial capitalism has profoundly negative consequences for society Link SolidarityTheir position of charity and false solidarity from above are the voyeuristicinvestments in suffering that re-entrench existing power structures and maketrue solidarity impossible.El Kilombo Intergalactico 7 (Collective in Durham NC that interviewed SubcomandanteInsurgente Marcos, Beyond Resistance: Everything, p. 1-2)

In our efforts to forge a new path, we found that an old friendthe Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacio- nal (Zapatista Army ofNational Liberation, EZLN)was already taking enormous strides to move toward a politics adequate to our time, and that it was

thus necessary to attempt an evaluation of Zapatismo that would in turn be adequate to the real event of their appearance. That is, despite the fresh air that the Zapatista uprising had blown intothe US political scene since 1994, we began to feel that even the inspiration of Zapatismo hadbeen quickly con- tained through its insertion into a well-worn and untenable narrative:Zapatismo was another of many faceless and indifferent third world movements thatdemanded and deserved solidarity from leftists in the global north. From our position as anorganization composed in large part by people of color in the United States, we viewed this focuson solidarity as the foreign policy equivalent of white guilt, quite distinct from any authenticimpulse toward, or recognition of, the necessity for radical social change. The notion of solidarity that still pervades much of the Left in the U.S. has continually served anintensely conservative political agenda that dresses itself in the radical rhetoric of the latestrebellion in the darker nations while carefully maintaining political action at a distancefrom our own daily lives, thus producing a political subject (the solidarity provider) that moreclosely resembles a spectator or voyeur (to the suffering of others) than a participant or active agent,while simultaneously working to reduce the solidarity recipi- ent to a mere object (of our pity andmismatched socks). At both ends of this relationship, the process of solidarity ensures that subjects and politicalaction never meet; in this way it serves to make change an a priori impossibility . In other words,this practice of solidarity urges us to participate in its perverse logic by accepting the narrativethat power tells us about itself: that those who could make change dont need it and that those who need change cant makeit. To the extent that human solidarity has a future, this logic and practice do not!For us, Zapatismo was (and continues to be) unique exactly because it has provided us with theelements to shatter this tired schema. It has inspired in us the ability, and impressed upon us the necessity, of alwaysviewing our- selves as dignified political subjects with desires, needs, and projects worthy of struggle. With the publication of TheSixth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle in June of 2005, the Zapatistas have made it even clearer that we mustmove beyond appeals to this stunted form of solidarity, and they present us with a far more difficultchallenge: that wherever in the world we may be located, we must become companer@s (neitherfollowers nor leaders) in a truly global struggle to change the world. As a direct response to this call, this analysis isour attempt to read Zapatismo as providing us with the rough draft of a manual for contemporary political action that eventually mustbe written by us all.

Solidarity is the manifestation of the illusion of compassion the

subaltern becomes the point of reference upon which Westernsociety exemplifies wealth, satisfaction, and happiness byconvincing the oppressed of its suffering.Baudrillard 96 (Jean, The Perfect Crime, 1996, p. 133 137)Our reality: that is the problem. We have only one, and it has to be saved. `We have todo something. We can't do nothing.' But doing something solely because you can't notdo something has never constituted a principle of action or freedom. Just a form ofabsolution from one's own impotence and compassion for one's own fate.The people of Sarajevo do not have to face this question. Where they are, there is anabsolute need to do what they do, to do what has to be done. Without illusion as to endsand without compassion towards themselves. That is what being real means, being inthe real. And this is not at all the `objective' reality of their misfortune, that reality which`ought not to exist' and for which we feel pity, but the reality which exists as it is -- thereality of an action and a destiny.This is why they are alive, and we are the ones who are dead. This is why, in our owneyes, we have first and foremost to save the reality of the war and impose that --compassionate -- reality on those who are suffering from it but who, at the very heart ofwar and distress, do not really believe in it. To judge by their own statements, theBosnians do not really believe in the distress which surrounds them. In the end, they findthe whole unreal situation senseless, unintelligible. It is a hell, but an almost hyperrealhell, made the more hyperreal by media and humanitarian harassment, since that makesthe attitude of the whole world towards them all the more incomprehensible. Thus, theylive in a kind of spectrality of war -- and it is a good thing they do, or they could neverbear it.But we know better than they do what reality is, because we have chosen them toembody it. Or simply because it is what we -- and the whole of the West -- most lack. Wehave to go and retrieve a reality for ourselves where the bleeding is. All these `corridors'we open up to send them our supplies and our `culture' are, in reality, corridors ofdistress through which we import their force and the energy of their misfortune. Unequalexchange once again. Whereas they find a kind of additional strength in the thoroughstripping-away of the illusions of reality and of our political principles -- the strength tosurvive what has no meaning -- we go to convince them of the `reality' of theirsuffering -- by culturalizing it, of course, by theatricalizing it so that it can serve as apoint of reference in the theatre of Western values, one of which is solidarity.This all exemplifies a situation which has now become general, in which inoffensive andimpotent intellectuals exchange their woes for those of the wretched, each supportingthe other in a kind of perverse contract -- exactly as the political class and civil societyexchange their respective woes today, the one serving up its corruption and scandals,the other its artificial convulsions and inertia. Thus we saw Bourdieu and the Abbe Pierreoffering themselves up in televisual sacrifice, exchanging between them the pathos-laden language and sociological metalanguage of wretchedness. And so, also, ourwhole society is embarking on the path of commiseration in the literal sense, undercover of ecumenical pathos. It is almost as though, in a moment of intense repentanceamong intellectuals and politicians, related to the panic-stricken state of history and thetwilight of values, we had to replenish the stocks of values, the referential reserves, byappealing to that lowest common denominator that is human misery, as though we hadto restock the hunting grounds with artificial game. A victim society. I suppose all it isdoing is expressing its own disappointment and remorse at the impossibility ofperpetrating violence upon itself.The New Intellectual Order everywhere follows the paths opened up by the New WorldOrder. The misfortune, wretchedness and suffering of others have everywhere becomethe raw material and the primal scene. Victimhood, accompanied by Human Rights as itssole funerary ideology. Those who do not exploit it directly and in their own name do soby proxy. There is no lack of middlemen, who take their financial or symbolic cut in theprocess. Deficit and misfortune, like the international debt, are traded and sold on in thespeculative market -- in this case the politico- intellectual market, which is quite the equalof the late, unlamented military--industrial complex. Now, all commiseration is part of thelogic of misfortune [malheur]. To refer to misfortune, if only to combat it, is to give it abase for its objective repro-- duction in perpetuity. When fighting anything whatever, wehave to start out -- fully aware of what we are doing -- from evil, never from misfortune. AFFSpeaking for others is inevitable, but the aff resolves the impacts.Jazeel and McFarlane 09/Tariq, PhD in Cultural Geography, Lecturer in Human Geography at The University ofSheffield, and Colin, PhD, Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Durham University,The limits of responsibility: a postcolonial politics of academic knowledge production,Transactions of the Institute of British Geographiers, The Royal Geographical Society,2009. Pages 114-115)/

At a banal level, research must be considered as one key optic through which intellectualcommunities in the global North find out about the world; the knowledge we disseminatehas effects on the imaginative geographies of our students, readers and fellow conferencedelegates, which itself demands a kind of responsible fidelity to the places andcommunities we research. In some senses this is no different from calling for aresponsible and transparent press, but in the context of the authority that intellectualwork calls around itself, it is to also remind that the academic knowledge we produce isconstitutive, and powerfully so. At worst then, in contemporary transnational academiclandscapes, our research daily produces the world precisely by computing the globalSouth in this unproblematic way, with the EuroAmerican professional intellectual poisedand positioned as the one who diagnoses (Spivak 1999, 255). At best on the other hand,as Edward Said or David Scott might suggest, research performed as criticism care-ful of,and attentive to, our own locatedness in the field as well as the EuroAmerican academyholds that potential of putting back together aspects of our common life so as to makevisible what has been obscured (Scott 2008, vi; our emphasis), or we would add, whatcan be achieved. This is an insurrectionary, yet in our terms responsible, dispositiontoward knowledge production that we would urge.Whatever the scenario though, according to Gayatri Spivak (and famously so), speakingfor in this sense is entirely unavoidable in EuroAmerican knowledge production. Webelieve that this recognition can be enabling. What these thoughts around the doubleplay of representation in disciplinary knowledge production gesture toward is thenecessity of a due sense of responsibility in the light of such an awareness about therepresentational mechanics of knowledge production. Unlike the epistemologicaldictums of enlightenment ways of knowing, research is always more than merelyformalised curiosity. The stakes of knowledge production are greater, because knowledgeis in and of the world, generative precisely because of its representational dynamics. Ifwe are aware of this, then methodologically we are always marked inside messy spaces ofimmersion and involvement at all stages of knowledge production. If it is interest thattakes us toward a research project, then responsibility must be stitched into thatinterestedness from the very outset. Knowledge production is inseparable from politicsin this respect. Interest can never be innocent.Conceiving of research and knowledge production this way inevitably reconfigures thegeographies in which we emplace ourselves as researchers. Anyone who producesknowledge of a thing (people place community) can never be outside that thing.Knowledge is never outside power thought this way (Jazeel 2007, 2946). At every stageof our research endeavour we must perennially confront those most important questionsconcerning what knowledge does, who it is for, and why we are producing it, which inturn demands an openness to knowledge that drives change, is insurrectionary, just as itrecognises the inevitability of speaking for. In this respect, our intellectualrepresentations can make room for interventions. They can humbly stake out oppositionin search of social, political and intellectual openings. But they can also be participatoryand collaborative in the field communities we work with, rather than authoritative anddogmatic (Said 2004 [1982], 42). As we discuss now, a crucial dimension in all this is acommitment to uncertainty, humility and unlearning in the research process that mightenable both researcher and researched to move on, change, not stand still. As DoreenMassey has recently written with regards to theorys relationship to politics, It is utterlyinvigorating to be in a situation where ideas really matter. But also one where they arenot simply taken as truth (2008, 496).